InsightSocial vs Apify

For social platforms specifically, InsightSocial's free tier gives you unlimited scraping plus 500 exported rows per month, no credit card and no compute-unit metering. Developers also get 10 free API calls. Apify's free tier gives $5 in platform credits, which is consumed by compute units, storage and proxy traffic. A heavy TikTok or LinkedIn run can exhaust it quickly. If your targets are outside social media, Apify's free tier is the more flexible starting point.

Yes. InsightSocial's API gives you one key for 22 platforms, including TikTok, LinkedIn, X, YouTube, Reddit, Pinterest, Bluesky and Telegram. A single GET returns JSON in the same response, with no actor run to start and no dataset to fetch afterwards. Every endpoint has a published price, calls that fail or find nothing are free, and the first 10 calls are free with no credit card.

Yes, as long as the actor is doing social media reads. In n8n, install the n8n-nodes-insightsocial community node, or point an HTTP Request node at the endpoint with your key in an x-api-key header. AI agents such as Claude, Cursor or Codex can use the official MCP server (npx -y insightsocial mcp), or read the public GET /v1/endpoints catalogue, which lists every path, parameter and price, and call the API directly.

For exporting social data from the extension, usually yes. InsightSocial Pro is $9.99/month for 10,000 exported rows, with scraping itself unmetered. Apify's entry paid tier is $19/month, and that $19 is a credit allowance rather than a ceiling: compute units, residential proxy GB, extra concurrency and actor fees all draw against it or bill on top. For bulk API work the answer flips. Apify's per-result actors are cheaper per profile than our API at volume. Our API is priced for one key across 22 platforms and a bill you can predict, not for million-row jobs.

One compute unit equals 1 GB of RAM running for one hour, priced from $0.13 to $0.20 per unit depending on your plan. It matters because consumption depends on the actor's memory setting, target site response time and retry count, none of which you know before the run starts. It is a common complaint about Apify's pricing. InsightSocial has no equivalent unknown: scraping is free, an export costs exactly one credit per row, and every API endpoint has a published price. Metered endpoints quote a range up front and charge what the call actually read.

With the Chrome extension, yes: it exports what your own logged-in session can see. Because the extension runs inside your own browser, it can read anything you can read by scrolling the page yourself. The API returns public data only: reaching a private page from a server would mean handing your credentials or cookies to a remote worker, which we never ask for.

No, on either product. The extension runs in your own browser, so requests come from your IP with your cookies at human scrolling speed and there is nothing to proxy. The API handles access on our side and its cost is inside each endpoint's published price. Either way there is no proxy line item, no per-GB charge and no CAPTCHA-solving fee.

Yes, through the API. Call it from your own cron job, server or n8n workflow and nothing needs to be open. Scheduled scrapes in the Chrome extension fire from the browser, so Chrome has to be running for those. If you want scheduling and webhooks managed for you, Apify has them built in and we do not.

The extension covers TikTok, LinkedIn, X/Twitter, YouTube, Reddit and Pinterest, plus 10 review and discussion sites (Trustpilot, Google Maps, Amazon, Etsy, Steam, Product Hunt, Hacker News, Quora, Blind and Notion), each with a purpose-built extractor rather than a generic page reader. The API covers 22 platforms. Apify's Store covers far more of the web overall, so for non-social targets it remains the broader option.

Never. The extension works alongside the session you are already signed into in Chrome. You sign in to InsightSocial itself with Google, and you never enter your TikTok, LinkedIn or X credentials anywhere.