Quick answer
Short version: pick Apify if you write code and want to build something custom. Pick Outscraper if you want cheap raw data at volume with no subscription. Pick Scrap.io if you work outside the US or need Apple and Bing Maps. Pick ZipLead if you sell services to US local businesses and the hard part is deciding who to contact first.
The thing most comparisons skip
Scraping is the easy half. Any of these tools will hand you 300 businesses in a few minutes. The part that eats your week is working out which of those 300 are worth an email, and that work does not go away because your CSV got bigger.
So the useful question is not which scraper is fastest. It is how much is left on your plate after the export.
Side by side
| Tool | Starting price | Built for | Left to do after export |
|---|---|---|---|
| Outscraper | Pay as you go, no monthly fee. First 500 places free, then roughly $28.50 per 10,000 | Bulk data pulls at volume | All filtering and prioritising |
| Apify | Around $1.50 per 1,000 scraped places, plus platform usage | Developers building custom pipelines | Everything, by design. It is infrastructure |
| Scrap.io | $49/mo Basic (10,000 credits) up to $499/mo. 7-day trial, 100 leads | High volume and non-US markets | Filtering is good. Ranking is still manual |
| ZipLead | Free tier that does not expire, then $59/mo | Selling services to US local businesses | List arrives scored 0-99 and sorted |
Pricing is taken from each vendor's own public pages as of August 2026 and changes often. Check with them directly before deciding.
Outscraper
The best value if you want raw data and already have a process. There is no subscription, the first 500 places are free, and the catalogue goes well beyond local business listings.
The tradeoff is that it is an extraction tool, not a prospecting workflow. You get a spreadsheet of every business it found, which is genuinely a lot of data, and deciding which rows deserve an email is still your job.
Apify
If you write code, this is the strongest option on the list and it is not close. Roughly $1.50 per 1,000 places, a solid API, and thousands of scrapers beyond Maps. Anyone building a data product should look here first.
If you do not write code, that flexibility is overhead. You pick an actor, configure the input, run it, then handle the output yourself. For an agency owner who wants a list of contractors to call, that is several layers above the actual job.
Scrap.io
The closest tool to ZipLead on this list, and better than it in real ways. It covers Google, Apple, and Bing Maps across 195 countries with polygon and radius search over custom areas. If you sell outside the US, this is the pick.
Two things to know: there is no permanent free tier, only a 7-day trial capped at 100 leads, and filtering is not the same as ranking. A filtered list still leaves you deciding who goes first.
ZipLead
Built for the step after extraction. Search a US zip code, city, region, or state, and every business comes back scored 0-99 on outreach readiness, sorted before you see it. Enrichment adds SMTP-verified emails, ad detection, review history, and site health.
Where it loses: it is US only, so it is the wrong tool if you sell internationally. Its data catalogue is narrower than a general platform like Apify. And at very high volume the pay-as-you-go tools are cheaper per record.
How to actually choose
- If you sell outside the US, use Scrap.io. The others are US-first and you will feel it immediately.
- If you write code and want to build something custom, use Apify.
- If you pull lists occasionally and already know how to filter them, Outscraper's pay-as-you-go pricing beats any subscription.
- If you sell services to US local businesses and your real bottleneck is deciding who to contact this week, use a tool that ranks rather than one that only extracts.
The cheapest way to settle it is to run the same search in two tools and look at the output side by side. Most of these have a free tier or trial, so the test costs you an hour rather than a month.