Octoparse vs Apify for Instagram hashtag data

Octoparse vs Apify is not a contest between two scrapers — it is a choice between a subscription for a builder and a meter on a marketplace. Octoparse sells a point-and-click desktop and cloud scraper you aim at almost any website, billed as a monthly plan for tasks and concurrency. Apify sells a runtime plus a Store of ready-made actors, where you pay a small platform plan that is really prepaid credit and then pay the actor's own per-result price. For Instagram hashtag data specifically, that difference decides your bill far more than either vendor's headline number does.

Every figure below was read from octoparse.com and apify.com in September 2026. Both change their prices; open the page before you commit to a year of either.

The short verdict

What Octoparse costs, as of September 2026

Octoparse publishes a free forever tier and two paid tiers, with annual billing discounted against monthly. Its own pricing page answers the question directly:

"Octoparse starts at $0 with a free forever plan that includes 10 tasks and 50,000 rows of monthly data export. Paid plans begin at $69/month for the Standard plan and $249/month for the Professional plan, both billed annually with 16% savings versus monthly billing." — octoparse.com/pricing, September 2026

The subscription is not the whole meter. Octoparse lists add-ons separately on the same page, and against a platform that blocks aggressively they are not optional extras: residential proxies at $3 per GB, CAPTCHA solving at $1 to $1.5 per thousand, and pay-per-result templates at $0.001 to $3 per thousand results. Paid plans carry a 5-day money-back window, and there are published discounts for startups, students and educators.

What Apify costs, as of September 2026

Apify's bill has two layers, and reading them as one is the usual mistake.

The first layer is the platform plan, which is prepaid credit rather than a fee on top — Apify's own wording on the Free tier is "$5 to spend in Apify Store or on your own Actors":

The second layer is the actor's own price, and for this job it is the layer that decides the bill. Apify's own Instagram Hashtag Scraper lists "Pricing from $1.90 / 1,000 results" on its Store page as of September 2026. It takes one or more hashtags, returns posts and reels with captions, engagement counts, timestamps and related hashtags, and — this is the part people get wrong in both directions — it asks for no Instagram login of any kind.

Pricing the same job on each

Take a concrete job: one hashtag, 10,000 posts a month, exported as CSV.

Two things that table hides, and they matter more than the numbers in it:

• Octoparse's meter has no idea what a post is. You pay per month for tasks and concurrency, so a run that finds nothing new costs the same share of your subscription as a run that returns four hundred posts. Polling a quiet hashtag hourly is pure loss under a subscription.
• Apify's per-result meter is honest about volume but not about waste. If the actor collects a thousand results and you only wanted last week's, you paid for the thousand.

Where the difference is not price

Octoparse is the more general tool and Apify is the more specific one, and that is the whole trade. If your Instagram hashtag job sits beside eight other scraping jobs across eight other sites, Octoparse's single subscription covers all nine and Apify would mean nine different actors with nine different meters. Its template gallery covers Instagram alongside Twitter, TikTok and the rest, so a person who does not write code can build and schedule the job themselves.

Apify wins on everything downstream of the data. Actors are called by API, scheduled, hooked to webhooks and driven from Node and Python SDKs, and the interface is the same for every actor in the Store — so the second scraping job you add costs an actor id and an input object, not a new build. If your pipeline is code, that is decisive.

Neither is built for the specific shape of "one hashtag, forever, on a timer." Octoparse charges you for a builder you will use once. Apify charges you per result for an actor that has no notion of a date boundary, so a schedule that runs hourly re-collects the same top of the feed until the limit stops it.

Who should stay where they are

Stay with Octoparse if you are not writing code and you scrape more than one site. That is the case its subscription was designed for, no per-row meter beats it there, and the free tier is genuinely usable for a local, occasional job. Stay with it too if your organisation will not paste an Instagram session cookie into a third-party tool — Octoparse does not ask for one.

Stay with Apify if you want a maintained actor you never have to fix when Instagram changes, if you need several hashtags per run, or if you want posts and reels with related-hashtag expansion out of the box. Its own actor needs no login, and $19 of prepaid credit on the Starter plan is a small amount of money to find that out.

The third option, for one hashtag on a schedule

This site's Instagram Hashtag Scraper is an Apify actor built for one job and priced against it: $0.0005 per delivered post, with no subscription, no per-run fee and no per-hashtag fee. It sits on the Apify platform, so the plan table above still applies to it — but the actor layer is where the difference lives.

Three specifics decide whether it fits:

• resultsLimit is a ceiling that is obeyed. Ask for 500 posts and the run stops at 500.
• onlyPostsNewerThan stops the walk rather than filtering afterwards, and onlyPostsOlderThan bounds the other end, so you can take a window out of the middle. A week of posts costs a week of rows.
• It runs on your own account's Instagram session. This is the real trade, and it is worth stating as bluntly as the price: you supply two cookie values yourself. If policy forbids that, this tool is not available to you and Apify's own actor or Octoparse is the correct answer.

It does one hashtag per run and nothing else — no profiles, no reels-only mode, no followers, no other websites at all. Against a builder that scrapes anything, that is a real loss of capability which a lower price does not repay unless the hashtag job is the job you actually have.

How to switch, either way

1. Write down the job in rows per month. Not tasks, not runs — rows. Every meter on this page prices something different, and rows is the only unit all three can be converted into.
2. Count the sites. More than one, and Octoparse's subscription is probably already the cheapest thing on the page.
3. Check whether a date filter would shrink the job. If you only ever want the last seven days, a tool that stops at a date bills a fraction of one that does not.
4. Try the free tier first. Octoparse Free runs locally at no cost; Apify's $5 credit is enough to run a few hundred results through its actor and see the output shape.
5. Budget the glue. Whatever was delivering your CSV to a sheet, a warehouse or a Slack channel is code you now own. That, not the subscription, is usually the real cost of moving.

The short version

Octoparse and Apify are not really competing for the same buyer. Octoparse sells breadth to someone who does not write code, at from $69 a month for the Standard plan. Apify sells a maintained, API-driven actor at from $1.90 per 1,000 results on top of a prepaid plan. If your job is one hashtag, watched on a schedule, with a bill you need to predict, read what a hashtag job costs on Apify for the platform side, the Octoparse alternatives page for the subscription side, or the full options comparison for everything that returns Instagram post data priced on one job.