Lyre Leads
Apify and Outscraper side by side
| Apify Google Maps Scraper | Outscraper | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Cloud scraping platform and marketplace of ready-made scrapers; its Google Maps Scraper is maintained by Apify. | Pay-as-you-go data platform: live Google Maps scraping plus separately priced enrichments and dozens of other sources. |
| How it finds businesses | Splits the location you give it into many map screens (or a polygon you draw) to get past the 120-per-search limit, then merges the places. | One Google Maps search per query, up to 500 places. For dense areas it tells you to split the query; the app can split a city by zip code or neighbourhood. |
| Cheapest paid plan | Starter $19 a month of prepaid usage; the Maps scraper costs $3 per 1,000 places on Starter. Emails and verification are paid add-ons. | No subscription. Google Maps places: first 500 free, then $3 per 1,000 up to 100,000, then $1 per 1,000. Emails and contacts are priced separately, from $3 per 1,000 sites. |
| Free tier | $5 of usage a month, no card: up to 1,250 places. The leads and verification add-ons cost $100 per 1,000 on Free. | First 500 Google Maps places and 500 website email lookups free each billing period; a card or prepaid credits needed to start. |
| Emails | Paid add-ons: company emails and social profiles from the business website, or employee names and work emails from a leads add-on. | A separately billed Emails & Contacts service reads each business website for emails, phones and social links. |
| Email verification | Paid add-on that checks the mailbox (ok, invalid, catch-all), but only for emails from the leads add-on, not website emails. | A separate, billed Email Address Verifier checks the mailbox (SMTP). |
| API and AI assistants | REST API, clients in seven languages, and an MCP server documented for ChatGPT and Claude. | REST API with official SDKs in six languages. |
| Best for (our view) | Developers who want automatic full-area Google Maps scraping behind an API and will assemble enrichment and qualification themselves. | Occasional or technical users who want cheap per-record extraction and pay only for what they switch on. |
| Sources | Maps scraper, Maps pricing, plans, Maps inputs, MCP, API docs | API docs, app, Maps prices, email prices |
Checked 14 October 2026. Each row links to the pages its facts were read on. Prices are in US dollars, per month on monthly billing, unless the cell says otherwise. "Best for" is our judgement, and we make Lyre Leads.
Outscraper's own website answered every request with a bot check on 14 October 2026, so its prices here come from the price data its web app loads and its API documentation, both on Outscraper's own domains.
How does each one cover a city?
A single Google Maps search stops after a slice of a city, about 120 places on the Maps website, and these two get past it in different ways.
Apify splits the area for you. Give its Google Maps Scraper a location and it opens many map screens inside it, scrolls each one and merges the places, which Apify says "bypasses the limitation of Google Maps of displaying (and scraping) no more than 120 places per area". You can also hand it a polygon or a point and radius. It only falls back to one screen if you type the place into the search term or paste a search URL, so fill in the location field.
Outscraper scrolls one search per query, up to its stated ceiling of 500 places, and tells you to split dense areas into smaller queries. Its web app can do the splitting by zip code or by neighbourhood, and it can drop the duplicates those overlapping queries return.
Both approaches get past one search; they split differently, by map screens on Apify and by named areas on Outscraper. We haven't put either through our own coverage test, so we can't tell you which finds more in a given city. How much splitting is worth at all depends on the city's size: in our test of 24 trade-and-city pairs, searching from many points found about 2.2 times as many businesses as one paged search in the median city, and almost nothing extra in a town of 62,000 (method and numbers).
What does a lead list cost on each?
Take 10,000 places in a month, with the emails their websites carry.
- Apify: on the Starter plan places cost $3 per 1,000, so $30, and the website-contacts add-on (company email, phones, social profiles) costs $2 per 1,000, so $20 more. The $19 plan fee is spent as prepaid usage toward that, and paid plans keep running past it into overage up to a limit you set. On the free plan, $5 of usage buys up to 1,250 places, but the leads and verification add-ons cost $100 per 1,000 there.
- Outscraper: the first 500 places are free, then $3 per 1,000, so about $28.50. Website emails are a separate service priced per site, again 500 free and then $3 per 1,000, so up to about $28.50 more. No monthly plan; when a prepaid balance runs out, usage keeps being charged to the card on file.
At this size the two land within a few dollars of each other, around $50 to $60. The difference shows at volume: Apify's per-place price falls with a bigger monthly plan ($2 on Scale, $1.50 on Business), while Outscraper's falls to $1 per 1,000 past 100,000 places with no plan at all.
How do they handle emails and verification?
Apify sells two email add-ons on its Maps scraper. One reads the business's own website for the company email, phones and social profiles. The other returns employee names, job titles and work emails; Apify doesn't say where those come from, and its example output carries LinkedIn identifiers. Its email verification add-on checks the mailbox and reports ok, invalid or catch-all, but only for emails from that second, leads add-on, not for the company emails read off websites.
Outscraper's Emails & Contacts service reads each website for emails, phones and social links, and a separate Leads & Contacts service returns named people. Its Email Address Verifier runs an SMTP check on the mailbox and is billed on its own.
So on both, a verified company email takes a separate step you pay for. Don't skip it: in our own study of 2,482 emails scraped from business websites, 14.2% of the addresses a mailbox check could decide were dead (the decay study).
Which works better with code and AI assistants?
Both are built for it. Apify has a REST API with clients in seven languages, a CLI, webhooks and scheduling, and an MCP server it documents for ChatGPT and Claude, so an assistant can run the Maps scraper directly. Outscraper has a REST API covering far more than Google Maps, with official SDKs in six languages. If your pipeline pulls from many kinds of websites, Apify's marketplace of other scrapers is the bigger draw; if it pulls from Maps, reviews and a few directories, Outscraper keeps it in one bill.
Which should I pick?
| If you need | Pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A big city or a whole region covered with no setup | Apify | Splits the location into many map screens itself |
| Occasional pulls with no plan | Outscraper | Pay as you go, 500 places free each period |
| A custom area drawn on a map | Apify | Takes a polygon or a point and radius |
| Maps, reviews and other sources on one bill | Outscraper | One account and API across dozens of sources |
| An AI assistant that runs the scrape | Apify | Documented MCP server for ChatGPT and Claude |
| A mailbox check on website emails from the same vendor | Outscraper | Its verifier takes any address; Apify's covers leads-add-on emails only |
Is there a third option?
We make one, so read this section knowing that. Lyre Leads isn't a scraper you configure. You type a keyword and a city, and in complete coverage mode it searches the city from many overlapping points, then reads each business's own website to check it's what you searched for and checks every address at the mailbox. Enrichment and verification are included in a monthly plan, 500 leads free and then $39 for 7,500, where a lead is a business found. It's the wrong pick if you want raw rows into your own warehouse at the lowest price per record, or scrapers for sites other than Google Maps; both Apify and Outscraper do that better. A wider sourced comparison is on our Apify alternatives and Outscraper alternatives pages.