In 2026, most of the web's visitors are software. Bots now make more web requests than people, and a growing share of them are AI agents that sign in, compare and finish tasks instead of copying pages into a spreadsheet.
That shift changes what a web scraping stack has to do. Apify is a scraping platform built around Actors that crawl, extract and store data; Solari is agent infrastructure that gives every task its own browser, sandbox or desktop from one API. To migrate, you keep your Playwright or Puppeteer code, swap the line that launches the browser for a Solari session, and move your logins into profiles and your proxies into Solari. This guide compares the two and walks through the move.
Why Are Scrapers Turning Into Agents?
A scraper used to be a scheduled job: crawl a list of pages, extract fields, write a dataset, repeat tomorrow. Agents sign in to an account, read what they find, decide the next step and run code on the result before they finish.
That asks more of the infrastructure. An agent needs a fresh browser per task, a login that lasts between runs, an exit IP that stays put during a multi-step flow, and a place to run code next to the browser. Teams on a crawl-and-dataset platform start working around it once their jobs look like this, and that is when they compare Solari and Apify.
Solari vs Apify at a Glance
Solari is built for agents that browse and act; Apify is built for scheduled scraping that ends in a dataset.
Apify runs Actors, which Apify describes as serverless cloud programs that take a JSON input, perform a task and produce structured output. Each Actor is built from a Dockerfile, comes with built-in storage and can run on a schedule, and Apify maintains the open-source Crawlee library for crawling with Playwright, Puppeteer or plain HTTP.
Apify sells monthly plans that include prepaid usage, then bills Actor runs in compute units, a measure of memory over time, with proxies, storage and data transfer on top. Unused prepaid usage expires at the end of each billing cycle, and a browser's memory sits inside the run's bill rather than on its own line.
Apify shines with its Store, a catalogue of ready-made scrapers that pull data from common sites without any code, and with datasets and schedules that make a recurring crawl easy to hand off. The trade-off: a browser launched by an Actor shares the Actor's container and memory, so concurrency is counted in runs rather than browsers, and agents that keep logins for days end up working around the run model.
How Do You Migrate From Apify to Solari?
Move the browser first, then logins, proxies, storage and schedules, and run both versions side by side before you cut over. Most Apify concepts have a direct Solari equivalent:
Sort your Actors. List which Actors are your own code and which come from Apify Store. Your own Actors built with Playwright, Puppeteer or Crawlee carry over, because their page logic is plain browser automation; for a Crawlee project, keep the request handlers and drive Solari sessions with Playwright directly. Store Actors are someone else's code, so keep them on Apify or rebuild the few you depend on.
Point the browser at Solari. Replace the line that launches a local browser with a Solari session. With the Solari SDK,
launch()opens a browser and connects in one call; with the client you already use,sessions.create()returns an endpoint that Playwright's connectOverCDP accepts. Everygoto, click and selector after that line stays as it is.Move logins into profiles. Save the signed-in state once as a Playwright storage state file and upload it to a Solari profile. Every later session that attaches the profile starts with the same cookies and site data, so your agent stops signing in on every run.
Swap Apify Proxy for Solari proxies. Turn on stealth and pass a proxy country when you create the session, with residential, static ISP or mobile IPs. Where an Actor reused one IP through an Apify Proxy session, give your Solari sessions the same
proxy.sessionlabel and they share an exit IP.Move results and schedules. Write results to the database your team already uses, or to a Solari volume mounted into a sandbox, which keeps its data after the machine is gone. Trigger runs from the scheduler you already run, such as a cron job, in place of Apify's schedules.
Run both, then cut over. Run the Solari version next to the Apify one with recording on, and compare the outputs row by row. Recording captures input values by default, so leave it off for sessions that type passwords.
What Role Does Solari Play?
Solari is the infrastructure your scraping agents run on: cloud browsers, sandboxes and desktops from one API and one account. Your agent brings the logic; Solari gives it a place to work at the scale your list needs.
A whole list in one pass. Solari browsers are ready in 8 ms, and with Solari you can launch up to 100,000 browser sessions at once. Your agent works through every site on a list in a single pass instead of queuing runs overnight.
Logins that stay signed in. A profile holds a session's login, so your agent signs in once and every later run opens already signed in. A login you saved from Playwright imports as is, so the page logic stays the same.
Sites that block automation. Turn on stealth for the sites that need it, route traffic through a proxy in the country you choose, and let Solari solve CAPTCHAs in the background. Every other site runs on the faster default browser.
Pricing per browser hour. Solari prices a browser hour from $0.15 down to $0.005 as your volume grows, with proxy traffic at $4 to $6 per GB, all on one bill. You pay for the browser time each task uses, not for the memory of a whole run.
Solari sandboxes run your parsing and cleanup code on isolated machines you can pause, snapshot and fork, on the same account and bill as your browsers.
Apify is the more established platform, with a large store of ready-made scrapers; Solari is the younger company and moves faster on speed and price. Choose Solari when your scrapers have become agents that sign in, run code and need a browser per task; stay on Apify when your work depends on Store Actors or on managed crawls that return a dataset on a schedule.
Where Are Scraping Agents Going Next?
Most scraping agents still handle one site and one task at a time. Over the next year that changes in four ways:
From datasets to actions. Agents will read a page and then act on it, with a person approving what matters.
Sessions that last. Agents will keep accounts signed in for weeks, so a saved login matters more than a fast crawl.
Agents that pay their own way. Agents will pay per run without a human account on more of the tools they use.
Agents that use any app. Models with computer use already operate software through a screen, so scraping agents will reach portals that never shipped an API.
What stays human is judgment: which sources to trust, what an agent may do under your name, and what to do with the result.
Get Started With Solari
Start with one Actor you wrote yourself, ideally one that signs in to a site, and run it on Solari next to the Apify version until the outputs match. Solari is the fastest and cheapest way to run cloud browsers and VMs for web scraping agents. Get started with a free account and start running your agents today.
