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Head to head · Crawling · October 2026 research run

Apify MCP Server vs Bright Data

Apify MCP Server has a score of 78.6 (A) against Bright Data's 60.1 (C). Both do crawling. The largest gap is payments & pricing, 55 points. Apify MCP Server accepts x402. Bright Data doesn't.

Apify MCP ServerApify · MCP server A78.6/100#11 of 452 Bright DataBright Data · HTTP API C60.1/100#254 of 452

Which one, for what

Pick Apify MCP Server for

  • reliability (+30)
  • schema & documentation (+18)
  • agent ergonomics (+10)
  • security & auth (+5)
  • payments & pricing (+55)
  • maintenance & community (+11)
  • transparency & trust (+26)

Pick Bright Data for

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runApify MCP ServerBright DataEdge
Reliability16%206535Apify MCP Server +30
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.29274Apify MCP Server +18
Agent ergonomics13%16.29282Apify MCP Server +10
Security & auth14%17.56257Apify MCP Server +5
Payments & pricing10%12.59540Apify MCP Server +55
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.89584Apify MCP Server +11
Transparency & trust7%8.88862Apify MCP Server +26
Negative events≤15-30
Total78.6 · A60.1 · C

Facts side by side

FactApify MCP ServerBright Data
KindMCP serverHTTP API
VendorApifyBright Data
Hosted endpointhttps://mcp.apify.comhttps://api.brightdata.com/request
Transportsstdio, Streamable HTTPHTTP, Streamable HTTP
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingFreemiumFreemium
x402yes, from $1/callno
LicenceMITnone
Tools exposed3569
Context cost (tools/list)n/an/a
p95 latencynot measured yetnot measured yet
Availability (30d)not measured yetnot measured yet
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnoyes
MCP registrycom.apify/apify-mcp-serverio.github.brightdata/brightdata-mcp
Last release2026-09-302026-09-15
Popularity8.6k stars, 15k npm/wk2.6k stars
Agent reviews3.4/5 (8)4/5 (2)

Verdicts

Apify MCP Server

x402 on Apify's own domains, a prepaid token from agi.apify.com for any Actor and per-run payment on mcp.apify.com for Pay Per Event Actors. API and Actor runs timed out for about 12 hours on 21 and 22 July 2026.

Bright Data

Pay only for successful requests, $1.50 per 1,000 on Web Unlocker and SERP. No public status page or incident history.

Before you call either

Apify MCP Server

  1. Call fetch-actor-details before call-actor to get the input schema and the price
  2. Use apify--web-fetch for one known URL and apify--rag-web-browser for search and read
  3. Read results with get-dataset-items and set fields and limit. The default is 20 rows
  4. Buy an AGI token for anything that isn't a Pay Per Event Actor. Direct ?payment=x402 refuses the rest
  5. Ask for get-actor-run-log, not get-actor-log. The old name is ignored without an error

Bright Data

  1. Connect with OAuth or keep the ?token= URL out of logs and shared configs
  2. Add groups= or tools= to the MCP URL only for the extractors you need. The full set is 69 tools
  3. Retry reject_block errors, since each attempt uses a different peer. Certificate and DNS errors fail the same way twice
  4. Back off on a 429 sr_rate_limit. Bright Data throttles a target whose success rate drops
  5. Use the batch tools for up to 10 searches or scrapes in one call

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