In 2026, most of the traffic on the web no longer comes from people: agentic traffic has passed human traffic online for the first time. A growing share of it is agents doing work in a browser, signing in, filling forms and checking prices, and that work asks more of the platform underneath than a scraper ever did.
That puts Solari and Apify on the same shortlist. Solari gives your agent a live cloud browser, sandbox or desktop that starts in milliseconds and bills by the browser hour; Apify sells ready-made scrapers, called Actors, and the cloud that runs them, billed in compute units. Choose Solari when your agent drives its own browser, and Apify when a prebuilt scraper already returns the data you need. This guide compares the two on speed, price and fit.
Why Are Teams Comparing Solari and Apify Now?
Teams compare the two when a scraping job turns into an agent. Web scraping used to be a batch job: a crawler pulls pages on a schedule and returns rows. Apify built its platform around that job, and Apify Store holds thousands of public Actors for it.
Agents work differently. They act in a loop, one page and one decision at a time, often behind a login, and the next step depends on what the last page showed. A fixed input and a fixed output no longer describe the job.
The search for a second platform usually starts with one of three events: the agent has to sign in and stay signed in, a scrape grows into a multi-step workflow, or the team already writes Playwright code and wants to run it as is.
Which Jobs Fit Each Platform?
The split follows the shape of the work: Solari for jobs where your agent decides each step, Apify for jobs a maintained scraper already covers. These are the jobs teams weigh most often:
Signed-in account work. The agent logs in to a supplier portal, a CRM or an internal tool and acts inside it. This runs on Solari, where the browser keeps its login between runs and your code controls every click.
Multi-step forms. The agent fills a quote form, reads the result and decides what to submit next. Each step depends on the page before it, so a live browser under your own agent loop fits better than a single job with a fixed input.
Catalogue and listing scrapes. You need every product, review or map listing from a well-known site. If a maintained Actor already covers that site, Apify lets you send an input and download the rows without writing a scraper.
Scheduled data pulls. A dataset refreshes every morning and lands in a spreadsheet or a warehouse. Apify ships scheduling, datasets and integrations for this, so the job runs without a separate pipeline.
Code next to the browser. The agent writes a script to clean what it found, or operates an app that has no web page. Solari runs that code in a sandbox and that app on a desktop, on the same account as the browser.
What Role Does Solari Play?
Solari is the infrastructure a browser agent runs on: cloud browsers, sandboxes and desktops from one account and one API. Your agent brings the logic; Solari gives it a place to work at the scale you need.
A full list in one pass. With Solari you can launch up to 100,000 browser sessions at once, so your agent works through every account, supplier or listing on a list in parallel instead of in a queue. A job that used to run overnight finishes while you watch it.
Logins that stay signed in. A Solari profile saves your login, your cookies and site data, so your agent signs in once and every later run opens already signed in. Profiles use Playwright's storage state format, so a login you already have imports as is.
Sites that block automation. Turn on stealth for the sites that need it and route traffic through a proxy in the country you choose. Every other site runs on the default browser, which is the fastest to start.
A record of every run. Record a session and replay it later, so a reviewer sees exactly what the agent read and clicked before it acted. The replay downloads as a line-by-line log you can keep with your own audit records.
Bring the code you have. Solari works with Playwright, Puppeteer and any client that speaks the Chrome DevTools Protocol. Moving an existing script over is a change to the connection URL.
Solari sandboxes run the code your agent writes, with pause, resume, snapshot and fork, and Solari desktops give computer use models a full screen to operate. Both bill on the same account as the browsers. Apify is the more established platform with the larger library of ready-made scrapers; Solari is the younger company and moves faster on speed and price.
Apify: Capabilities, Pricing and Fit
Core capabilities. Apify Actors are serverless cloud programs that take a structured JSON input, perform a task such as scraping or browser automation, and return structured output. Apify also maintains Crawlee, its open-source crawling library, and agents call Actors through its API. Each Actor runs inside a Docker container sized by the memory you choose.
Pricing and plans. Apify says its free account includes $5 of monthly usage, its paid tiers add a monthly fee that prepays usage at a lower compute-unit price on the larger tiers, and its largest self-serve tier allows 256 concurrent runs. Prepaid usage that goes unspent expires at the end of the billing cycle. For a buyer, the bill depends on how many runs you start, how long they last and how much memory each one reserves.
Where it shines. Standard scrapes where a maintained Actor already exists, such as a maps listing, a social profile or a store catalogue. Scheduling, datasets and integrations are built in, so you send an input and download the rows.
Trade-off. An Actor is a job: input in, output out, inside a container. An agent that needs to hold a page open and choose each next step works against that shape, and it pays for the container's memory the whole time it waits.
Which Is Faster, Solari or Apify?
Solari is faster to start a browser, and it publishes the number. On Steel's open-source benchmark, across 5,000 runs, a Solari session is created in 8 ms and the whole run, create to release, averages 199.9 ms; the pull request is open, so you can rerun it.
Apify publishes no browser start time. Its Actors start as containers, with CPU allocated from the memory you set. For an agent that opens many short sessions in a loop, start time adds to every task, so it adds to every hour the agent runs.
Which Is Cheaper, Solari or Apify?
For a browser agent, Solari is simpler to forecast: you pay per browser hour, from $0.10 down to $0.07 as you move up a tier, and paid tiers start at $20 a month. Your cost tracks how long your agents run, not how much memory each one reserves.
On Apify, 1,024 MB of memory for one hour is one compute unit, and an Actor that renders pages with Playwright or Puppeteer needs at least that much memory. Your cost rises with memory and run time, so a browser-heavy job costs more than a plain HTTP one.
Proxies follow the same pattern. Solari charges from $4.00 per GB of proxy traffic, and you can block heavy images and video so they never cross the proxy. Apify sells residential proxies by the gigabyte too, with a lower rate on its larger tiers.
Which Should You Choose, Solari or Apify?
Choose Solari when your agent drives its own browser: it signs in, reads a page, decides and acts, often across thousands of sites at once. Solari starts that browser faster, bills it by the hour it runs and puts sandboxes and desktops on the same account, so the code and the screens your agent needs sit next to it.
Stay with Apify when a maintained Actor already returns the rows you need and the job is a scheduled scrape with a fixed input. Its store and built-in datasets save you writing that scraper at all.
Many teams run both: Apify for the catalogue pulls, Solari for the agents that work behind a login. As more scrapes turn into workflows that end in an action, such as a form submitted or a record updated, more of that work moves to a browser your agent controls.
Get Started With Solari
Start with one agent that signs in to a tool your team uses every day, see how it runs in the introduction to Solari, then scale it to the full list once it runs cleanly.
Solari is the fastest and cheapest way to run cloud browsers and VMs for web agents. Get started with a free account and start running your agents today.
