Best Google Maps Scrapers for Lead Generation (2026)

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

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 catalog 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.

The full breakdown, including where Outscraper is the better buy, is in ZipLead vs Outscraper.

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.

One pricing detail to check first. The $1.50 covers the basic place record. On Apify's Google Maps actor, fuller place details, company contact enrichment, and reviews are each billed as separate events, so price out the fields you actually need before you compare. More in ZipLead vs Apify.

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.

Also read the plan table before you count on the map search. On Scrap.io's pricing page, radius search is not included on Basic, and polygon search only comes with the Company plan. The rest of the comparison is in ZipLead vs Scrap.io.

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 contact emails from the business's own site, the software they run, ad detection, and site health.

Where it loses: it is US only, so it is the wrong tool if you sell internationally. Its data catalog is narrower than a general platform like Apify. And at very high volume the pay-as-you-go tools are cheaper per record.

One more difference, because it matters for the next section: ZipLead does not scrape Google Maps pages. It pulls listings from the official Google Places API and adds Foursquare for coverage.

Scraping Google Maps vs. using the official API

Most scraper roundups skip this part. If you plan to build a business on the data, it matters more than price.

A scraper reads Google Maps the way a person would and copies what it finds. Apify describes its actor working that way, opening Google Maps and pulling information from each page. An official API is a different arrangement. You pay Google per request and get the data back under Google's rules.

Google's own position is clear. The Google Maps terms for regular users say you may not mass download or create bulk feeds of Maps content. The Google Maps Platform terms, which cover paying API customers, have a section titled No Scraping.

The scraper vendors read it differently. Apify's documentation says scraping publicly available data is legal, and also tells you to factor in Google's terms. Outscraper points to the First Amendment. But whether something is legal and whether it breaks a platform's terms are separate questions, and the realistic cost of the second one is losing access. This is not legal advice. If real revenue depends on the data, ask a lawyer.

The official route has rules of its own. Google's Places API policies let you keep a place ID indefinitely, and say the rest of the content must not be cached or stored beyond the exceptions Google allows. Any tool built on the API, ZipLead included, is bound by those rules.

How fresh is the data?

A lead list starts going stale the day you pull it. Businesses close, change numbers, and move. Two questions tell you what you are actually getting.

• Is it pulled when you search, or served from a stored database? Outscraper says its Google Maps data is live. Apify's actor runs against Google Maps when you start it. Scrap.io describes a database it updates continuously, and does not publish how often any single record gets refreshed.
• Are closed businesses removed? A place Google lists as permanently closed is a wasted dial. ZipLead keeps those out of a new search's results.

Whichever tool you use, pull the list close to when you will work it. A CSV from last quarter is mostly guesses.

What to check before you pay

• Coverage in your own market. Run the same ZIP or city in two tools and look for businesses you already know are there.
• What a credit actually means. Scrap.io counts each place once per 30-day period. Outscraper's volume tiers reset every 30 days. Rules like these move your real cost more than the headline number does.
• Which fields cost extra. Contact details, reviews, and social profiles are often add-ons, as they are on Apify's Maps actor.
• Where the emails come from. An address read off the business's own contact page is a better bet than one guessed from a name pattern.
• Map search limits by plan. Radius and polygon search are not on every tier.
• How the list is sorted when it lands. If it arrives alphabetical or by distance, the sorting is still your job.

What to do after the export

The export is where the work starts. These steps apply whichever tool you picked.

1. Take out anyone you already sell to or have ruled out. ZipLead has an exclusion list for this. In a spreadsheet, a lookup against your customer list does the same job.
2. Split independents from chains. The owner of a single location can say yes on the call. A franchise location usually sends you to corporate.
3. Rank what is left. Pick the two or three signals that predict a sale for what you sell, like the state of their website, recent reviews, or whether they run ads, and sort on them. ZipLead does this with a 0-99 score. How to score local business leads shows how to do it by hand.
4. Look before you reach out. Open the website and read a few recent reviews for your top 20. One specific observation beats any template.
5. Move the list to where you work. Import the CSV into your CRM, or if you use HubSpot, send the list to HubSpot straight from ZipLead.
6. Follow the email rules. The FTC's CAN-SPAM guide says the law makes no exception for business-to-business email, so cold emails to local businesses are covered too.

How to actually choose

1. If you sell outside the US, use Scrap.io. The others are US-first and you will feel it immediately.
2. If you write code and want to build something custom, use Apify.
3. If you pull lists occasionally and already know how to filter them, Outscraper's pay-as-you-go pricing beats any subscription.
4. 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.

For everything else on building lists from map data, start at the Google Maps lead generation guide.