I asked Apify’s Instagram Scraper and the ScrapeCreators User Posts endpoint for 12 recent posts from each of the same 50 public profiles.
Both services returned 600 posts. ScrapeCreators finished 11.94 times faster and cost 93.2% less at its $47 credit-pack rate.
Result
| Metric | ScrapeCreators | Apify Instagram Scraper |
|---|---|---|
| Profiles requested | 50 | 50 |
| Profiles with results | 50 | 50 |
| Posts returned | 600 | 600 |
| Total wall time | 10.17 seconds | 121.44 seconds |
| Observed cost | $0.094 | $1.38 |
| Shared shortcodes | 596 | 596 |
| Provider-only shortcodes | 4 | 3 |
This is where the providers’ billing models produce a large difference. ScrapeCreators charged for 50 feed requests. Apify charged for 600 returned results.
Methodology
The test used the 50 most-followed accounts from Wikipedia’s July 2026 Instagram table.
ScrapeCreators received one request per handle:
curl --get "https://api.scrapecreators.com/v2/instagram/user/posts" \
-H "x-api-key: $SCRAPE...KEY" \
--data-urlencode "handle=cristiano" \
--data-urlencode "trim=true"
Each successful response returned 12 feed items. The 50 requests ran in parallel.
Apify received the same 50 profile URLs in one Actor run:
{
"resultsType": "posts",
"directUrls": [
"https://www.instagram.com/cristiano/"
],
"resultsLimit": 12
}
A profile counted as successful only when it produced results attributed to the requested username. I compared the returned Instagram shortcodes to measure output overlap.
This test does not treat a small feed difference as an accuracy failure. The providers did not complete at the same instant. Instagram feeds can also differ because of pinned content, new uploads, deletions, and source ranking behavior.
You can download the normalized per-profile results.
Cost
Apify’s Bronze price was $0.0023 per result. Six hundred result events cost exactly $1.38.
ScrapeCreators charged one credit per successful feed request. Fifty requests returned the same total of 600 posts.
| Pricing basis | Cost for the workload | Difference from Apify |
|---|---|---|
| Apify Bronze | $1.3800 | Baseline |
| ScrapeCreators $47 pack | $0.0940 | 93.2% less |
| ScrapeCreators $497 pack | $0.0497 | 96.4% less |
This does not mean every Apify workload is 93% more expensive. It means a request-based price is much cheaper for an endpoint that bundles 12 useful items into one response, while Apify’s Actor bills for each item.
Apify’s $29 Starter plan includes $29 of usage. The run may feel included for an existing subscriber, but it still consumed $1.38 of the monthly allowance.
Speed, reliability, and overlap
ScrapeCreators completed all 50 profile-feed requests in 10.172 seconds at concurrency 50. Its median request took 3.15 seconds, and p95 was 5.40 seconds.
Apify’s one Actor run took 121.437 seconds.
ScrapeCreators therefore completed the workload 11.94 times faster.
Reliability was tied at the profile level:
- ScrapeCreators returned results for 50 of 50 profiles.
- Apify returned results for 50 of 50 profiles.
- Neither provider needed a retry.
The shortcode sets were also very close:
- 596 shortcodes appeared in both outputs.
- Four appeared only in the ScrapeCreators output.
- Three appeared only in the Apify output.
The union contained 603 unique posts. That means the two fresh feed snapshots agreed on 98.8% of the union.
I would not label the seven different items as errors without a frozen Instagram reference. The more defensible conclusion is that both providers produced nearly identical 12-post snapshots while ScrapeCreators did it faster and at a much lower cost.
Which one should you use?
Choose ScrapeCreators’ Instagram API when:
- you need recent posts from many profiles inside an application
- one-credit feed pages fit your cost model
- low response time matters
- you want cursor-based pagination through a normal REST endpoint
Choose Apify when:
- you want the output delivered through Apify datasets and exports
- schedules and webhooks are already part of your collection pipeline
- you want to combine Instagram with custom Actors or arbitrary web crawling
For this 50-profile, 600-post workload, ScrapeCreators won on both speed and price. Both services returned every profile and nearly the same post set.
For a single post URL rather than a profile feed, read the 1,000-URL Instagram post benchmark. For profile metadata, see the 50-profile comparison.
