I requested up to 12 Reels from each of the same 50 major Instagram profiles through Apify’s Instagram Scraper and the ScrapeCreators User Reels endpoint.
ScrapeCreators was 13.6 times faster on the first pass and cost much less. Apify had better profile coverage.
Result
| First-pass metric | ScrapeCreators, using user IDs | Apify Instagram Scraper |
|---|---|---|
| Profiles requested | 50 | 50 |
| Profiles with results | 46 | 49 |
| Records returned | 549 | 589 |
| Unique shortcodes | 549 | 588 |
| Total wall time | 25.97 seconds | 353.26 seconds |
| Observed cost | $0.08648 | $1.3524 |
| Shared shortcodes | 537 | 537 |
A retry recovered one more ScrapeCreators profile and 12 more Reels. Three profiles still returned uncharged errors. Apify missed one profile, snoopdogg.
This is not a clean reliability win for ScrapeCreators. It is a speed and cost win with a real coverage trade-off.
Methodology
The test used the 50 most-followed accounts from Wikipedia’s July 2026 Instagram table.
The ScrapeCreators endpoint accepts either handle or user_id. Its documentation says user IDs are faster, so I tested both and used the recommended user-ID run for the primary speed result.
curl --get "https://api.scrapecreators.com/v1/instagram/user/reels" \
-H "x-api-key: $SCRAPE...KEY" \
--data-urlencode "user_id=173560420" \
--data-urlencode "trim=true"
The 50 requests ran in parallel.
Apify received the same profile set in one Actor run:
{
"resultsType": "reels",
"directUrls": [
"https://www.instagram.com/cristiano/"
],
"resultsLimit": 12
}
The Actor returned up to 12 Reels per profile. Several accounts had fewer than 12 available through the source, so 49 successful profiles produced 589 records rather than 600.
For ScrapeCreators, obtaining a numeric user ID may require a profile lookup if the application does not already store one. I report the direct Reels cost and the combined profile-plus-Reels cost separately.
You can download the normalized per-profile results.
Cost
The Apify run returned 589 records, and its run metadata listed 589 result events. The actual usageTotalUsd charge was $1.3524, equivalent to 588 units at $0.0023. I use the actual recorded charge rather than silently changing it to the theoretical $1.3547.
The ScrapeCreators user-ID first pass charged 46 credits. Four failed requests were not charged.
| Pricing basis | First-pass cost | Difference from Apify |
|---|---|---|
| Apify Bronze | $1.3524 | Baseline |
| ScrapeCreators $47 pack | $0.08648 | 93.6% less |
| ScrapeCreators $497 pack | $0.04572 | 96.6% less |
| ScrapeCreators $47 pack, including 50 profile lookups | $0.18048 | 86.7% less |
The combined lookup price is the conservative comparison for a caller starting with handles. A system that already stores Instagram user IDs would not need those extra 50 profile requests.
The cost gap comes from billing shape. ScrapeCreators charges one credit for a successful page containing up to 12 Reels. Apify charges per returned Reel.
Speed, reliability, and overlap
The recommended ScrapeCreators user-ID run completed in 25.975 seconds. Apify’s Actor took 353.257 seconds.
ScrapeCreators was 13.6 times faster on the first pass.
The ScrapeCreators median request took 3.09 seconds. Its p95 was 25.65 seconds, showing that a few slow upstream responses controlled the wall time.
Reliability favored Apify:
- Apify returned Reels for 49 of 50 profiles.
- ScrapeCreators returned Reels for 46 of 50 profiles on the user-ID first pass.
- A retry recovered
realmadrid, bringing ScrapeCreators to 47 profiles. championsleague,nba, andsnoopdoggstill failed with uncharged upstream errors.- Apify also returned no Reels for
snoopdogg.
The first-pass shortcode comparison found:
- 537 shortcodes in both outputs
- 12 only in ScrapeCreators
- 51 only in Apify
- 600 unique shortcodes across the union
That is 89.5% overlap across the union. The difference is larger than the normal posts feed comparison because ScrapeCreators failed four profiles on the first pass and Apify failed one. The calls also finished several minutes apart, so new and reordered Reels can affect the edge of each 12-item page.
I would not claim equal accuracy from this result. Apify had better coverage. ScrapeCreators had much better speed and cost.
Which one should you use?
Choose ScrapeCreators’ Instagram API when:
- speed and request-based pricing matter most
- your application already stores Instagram user IDs
- you can retry uncharged transient failures
- one REST API for Reels, posts, profiles, and other social platforms is useful
Choose Apify when:
- first-pass profile coverage matters more than the speed and price difference
- you want Reels written to an Apify dataset
- schedules, exports, and webhooks are already part of the pipeline
- your workflow also needs custom Actors or arbitrary web crawling
My honest conclusion: ScrapeCreators won heavily on speed and price, but this endpoint needs reliability work before I would call it an overall win. Apify returned two more profiles even after one ScrapeCreators retry.
For profile posts, read the 600-post feed comparison. For individual post and Reel URLs, see the 1,000-URL benchmark.
