Apify is a marketplace. You pick a YouTube transcript Actor, feed it video URLs, and get structured JSON back — and there are tens of thousands of other Actors sitting next to it for every other site you might need. VidProxy is one service doing one job: it watches YouTube channels and pushes the transcript to your webhook the moment a new video is published. The two overlap less than the search results suggest.
A cloud platform for running scrapers, called Actors, published by Apify and by independent developers. Several handle YouTube transcripts. You supply video URLs, the Actor runs, and structured data lands in a dataset you read.
One service that watches YouTube channels, remembers what it has already delivered, and pushes each new video's transcript to your webhook. On-demand single-video lookup is included.
The honest version of this comparison starts by admitting that Apify can be made to do what VidProxy does. It has real scheduling — the docs are blunt about it: "Schedules allow you to run your Actors and tasks at specific times. You schedule the run frequency using cron expressions." It has real webhooks that POST to a URL you nominate. Anyone telling you Apify "can't do monitoring" hasn't read the platform docs.
The gap is narrower than that and more annoying. Apify's webhooks are attached to an Actor and fire on the lifecycle of a run — the run finished, the run failed. They do not fire because a YouTube channel published something. So the scheduled run of a channel Actor hands you the same list of recent videos it handed you an hour ago, and the job of working out which entry is new belongs to you: store the last video ID somewhere, diff against it, then kick off transcript fetches for whatever survived the diff. That is a small database and a moderate amount of glue, and it is the part that breaks quietly at 3am when a run overlaps the previous one.
VidProxy keeps that state. A subscription has a last-seen video, delivery rows are claimed before the POST goes out, and a video that has already been delivered cannot be delivered again. You receive one webhook per new video with the transcript already inside it. There is nothing to diff.
Breadth, by an enormous margin. The Apify Store describes itself as "the largest marketplace of tools for AI: 59,000+ ready-to-run tools called Actors." If your pipeline needs YouTube transcripts and Amazon pricing and Google Maps reviews, you get all of it from one account, one API token, one invoice, and one mental model. VidProxy has no answer to that. We do YouTube.
Apify is also the better home for anything bespoke. Actors take arbitrary JSON input and run your code in the cloud, so when your requirement stops matching what any hosted product offers, you write the Actor. And for one-off bulk work — you have 40,000 video IDs in a CSV and you want transcripts for all of them once — a per-result Actor charge is a cleaner fit than a subscription with a monthly credit ceiling.
Anything continuous. If the sentence describing your project contains the words "when a new video is published," you are describing monitoring, and monitoring is the thing VidProxy ships as a product rather than as ingredients. Twenty channels watched at a two-minute poll interval, transcripts held until YouTube finishes generating captions, an AI summary attached before the payload leaves — that is a configuration screen here, and a weekend on Apify.
Two smaller things that matter more than they sound. Transcript fetching goes out through a residential-IP proxy, because YouTube treats data-centre ranges differently and the failure mode when it refuses you is an empty response rather than an error. And there is a hosted MCP server with eight tools, so Claude or Cursor can fetch a transcript, search what you've collected, or add a channel without you writing a client. Apify publishes an MCP endpoint too, at mcp.apify.com, aimed at searching and running Actors — a different job from driving a monitoring account.
| Capability | Apify | VidProxy |
|---|---|---|
| Transcript Retrieval | ||
| Transcript by video ID or URL | ✓ Via a transcript Actor | ✓ GET /api/transcript |
| Timestamped caption segments | ✓ | ✓ |
| Language selection | ✓ Actor-dependent | ✓ Where YouTube has captions |
| AI summary, takeaways, topic tags | ✕ | ✓ Pro / Agency |
| Monitoring & Delivery | ||
| Cron scheduling | ✓ Platform feature | ✓ Poll interval by plan |
| Outbound webhook | ✓ On run finish / fail | ✓ On new video |
| Knows which videos you've already seen | ~ You store and diff it | ✓ Tracked per subscription |
| Transcript already inside the webhook payload | ~ You chain a second Actor | ✓ |
| Waits for captions that aren't ready yet | ✕ You build the retry | ✓ Held up to 24h |
| Keyword alerts on transcript text | ✕ | ✓ Pro / Agency |
| Reach & Access | ||
| Sites and platforms covered | ✓ 59,000+ Actors | YouTube only |
| Run your own custom code in the cloud | ✓ | ✕ |
| MCP server | ✓ Search / run Actors | ✓ 8 tools over your account |
| Residential-IP transcript fetching | ✓ Apify Proxy, in-platform | ✓ Default path |
| Pricing & Model | ||
| Free tier without a card | ✓ $5/mo platform usage | ✓ 1 channel, 10 lookups/mo |
| Pricing model | Plan credits + per-result Actor charges | Flat monthly plan |
| Entry paid tier | $29/mo Starter | $9/mo Starter |
Each of these is a small piece of code. Together they are the reason "just schedule an Actor" takes a weekend.
A scheduled Actor returns a channel's recent uploads, not its new ones. Somewhere you have to keep the last video ID you handled and compare against it on every run. VidProxy stores that on the subscription.
Two overlapping runs will happily send the same video twice, and a duplicate downstream is worse than a late one. Deliveries here are claimed in the database before the POST leaves, so a race can't produce a second copy.
YouTube often publishes a video several minutes before auto-captions finish generating. Fetch too early and you get an empty transcript with no error. VidProxy holds the delivery and retries every cycle for up to 24 hours.
Transcript requests from cloud IP ranges get treated differently to requests from a home connection. Apify solves this with its own in-platform proxy; if you leave the platform and self-host, this is the wall you hit first.
Apify charges on two axes at once. Your subscription buys a monthly allowance of platform usage — Free comes with $5, Starter is $29, Scale $199, Business $999 — and the Actors you run draw that allowance down. Community Actors are usually priced per result: pintostudio/youtube-transcript-scraper lists $10.00 per 1,000 results, karamelo/youtube-transcripts lists $5.00 per 1,000 transcripts. Both are pay-per-event, and Apify's pricing page is explicit that overage lands on your next invoice.
That model rewards spiky work. A one-time run over ten thousand videos costs what it costs and then stops costing anything, which no monthly plan can match.
VidProxy charges once: Free $0, Starter $9, Pro $29, Agency $79. Each plan carries a channel limit (1 / 15 / 100 / 1,000) and a monthly on-demand lookup quota (10 / 500 / 2,500 / 10,000). Channel monitoring isn't metered against those lookups — a channel that publishes eleven videos in a week costs the same as one that publishes nothing. For a pipeline that runs every day and never turns off, that predictability is the whole argument.
Both let you start without a card. Apify's free plan includes $5 of monthly platform usage; VidProxy's free plan gives you one monitored channel, one webhook, 10-minute polling and 10 on-demand transcript lookups a month, which is enough to watch a real channel and see a real transcript arrive in your own endpoint before you decide anything.
Every Apify figure above was read from Apify's own pricing page, Store listing and Actor pages on 12 August 2026. Actor prices are set by their publishers and change without notice — check the Actor page before you budget.
These aren't mutually exclusive and plenty of stacks would sensibly hold both. Apify for the wide, occasional, cross-platform pulls; VidProxy for the YouTube feed that has to be live and has to be clean. The overlap is narrow — it's really just single-video transcript lookup, where the deciding factor is your volume.
If you're weighing this against Google's own API rather than a scraper, the YouTube Data API comparison covers the quota maths. If you're comparing hosted transcript endpoints, VidProxy vs Supadata and VidProxy vs CreatorCrawl are the closer reads.
pintostudio/youtube-transcript-scraper lists $10.00 per 1,000 results, and karamelo/youtube-transcripts lists $5.00 per 1,000 transcripts. Both are pay-per-event, and those charges draw down the platform usage credits included in your plan. Apify's own plans are Free ($0, including $5 of monthly platform usage), Starter ($29), Scale ($199) and Business ($999).
GET /api/transcript takes a video ID or a YouTube URL and returns the transcript with timestamps; the free plan includes 10 of those a month with no card. Apify gets you the same thing by running a transcript Actor. If a one-off fetch is all you need, price at your volume decides it, not capability.
Subscribe to a channel and get transcripts delivered automatically. Free tier, no credit card.
No credit card · Free tier forever