Apify Google Maps Scraper Review: Pricing, How It Works, and Best Alternatives (2026)

Apify Google Maps Scraper is a cloud-based actor on the Apify platform that pulls business listings out of Google Maps. It is priced per result, at $4 per 1,000 scraped places. Google Maps itself stops at about 120 listings per query. Apify's actor gets past that with a grid-search technique. As of July 2026 the actor shows 541,000 total users and a 4.8-star rating on the Apify Store.

By Shane Daly, Content Writer at Lead Scrape

Last updated August 2026

Both tools pull business data out of online directories. They differ on how you pay for it and how wide they cast the net. Lead Scrape is a desktop application that reads multiple business directories for a flat $247 a year on the Business version, or $97 a year for the Standard version, with email verification, tech stack analysis and SEO metrics in both versions.

What Is Apify Google Maps Scraper?

Apify Google Maps Scraper is a serverless actor published by Compass on the Apify platform. It reads business listings off Google Maps (name, address, phone number, rating, website URL) and hands the results back as CSV, JSON, Excel or a Google Sheet. You do not write any code to use it.

How Does The Apify Google Maps Scraper Work?

You enter search terms or a Google Maps URL, set result limits, and click Start. The actor handles pagination and exports structured business listings to CSV, JSON, Excel, or Google Sheets.

Each scraped record includes the business name, address, phone, website, category, rating, review count, hours, Google Place ID, and coordinates. Optional settings pull email addresses, social media profiles, images and review text into the same export.

To run a scrape, follow these steps:

1. Sign in to Apify Console
2. Open the Google Maps Scraper actor (maintained by Compass)
3. Enter search terms or paste a Google Maps URL
4. Set result limits and geolocation boundaries
5. Click Start
6. Export results to CSV, JSON, Excel, or Google Sheets once the run completes

Proxy rotation, pagination and anti-blocking are all handled for you. On a self-built scraper those three are the permanent maintenance cost, which is what the hosted price buys off.

Geolocation and Custom Search Areas

You can target a city, a zip code, a state or a whole country. If none of those match the area you actually care about, the actor takes raw latitude and longitude, or a bounding box drawn from two coordinate pairs. Non-US markets work the same way, so "Zahnärzte" across Berlin or "solicitors" across Greater Manchester behaves like any US city search, allowing for thinner Maps coverage in some regions.

How Apify Handles Google's Anti-Bot Defenses

Google throws CAPTCHAs, rate limits and IP blocks at anything that looks automated, and it reshuffles the page structure often enough to break any scraper nobody is maintaining. Apify absorbs most of that. It rotates residential proxies, paces requests so they do not read as machine traffic, retries what fails, and the actor gets patched when Google moves things around. Big runs still hit blocks. If yours keeps dying partway through, cut it into smaller batches.

How Do Apify Google Maps Scraper and Lead Scrape Compare?

Apify bills per result on a credit system, at $4 per 1,000. Lead Scrape is a flat $247 a year for unlimited scraping, with email verification, tech stack data, SEO metrics, CRM integrations and native webhook support included in the price. Apify verifies nothing it collects and has no built-in integrations or outbound webhooks.

Data Accuracy and Freshness

Apify reads Google Maps live, so you get whatever Google happens to be showing that day. That includes the closed and long-abandoned listings Google is still carrying, and the actor cannot tell you which ones those are. Lead Scrape reads several directories at once, and the built-in email verifier catches dead addresses before they reach a send list.

How Much Does The Apify Google Maps Scraper Actually Cost?

The Apify Google Maps Scraper costs $4 per 1,000 results. A free tier provides $5 in monthly credits, which covers a few test runs. The bill is simply your record count multiplied by that rate.

Several G2 reviews note that costs accumulate faster than expected when running multiple actors or enrichment steps. One G2 reviewer wrote: "The pricing can get expensive quickly if you're running large-scale scraping jobs. The free tier is very limited and it's easy to burn through credits without realizing it." G2 reviews for Apify checked July 2026.

This table models the Lead Scrape Business licence at $247 a year. Standard is $97 a year, which moves the crossover point down to roughly 2,000 results a month.

The two lines cross at about 5,000 results a month, which is where $4 per 1,000 adds up to the $247 a Lead Scrape licence costs. Below that Apify is genuinely the cheaper buy, and you should use it. Above it the gap opens and keeps opening: an agency pulling 20,000 local business listings a month is $713 better off in year one.

Who Should Use Which Tool?

Apify suits the engineer wiring a Google Maps scrape into a larger data pipeline and running it a handful of times a quarter. Pay-per-result stays cheap at that volume, and the actor ecosystem is built for exactly that kind of assembly. The other buyer is the agency pulling a fresh list of local businesses most weeks and wanting those records in a CRM by Friday. In this case, one annual price with unlimited records with emails, enrichment and CRM integrations is a better choice.

Apify is a good fit if: your volumes are low enough that the per-result meter stays under the cost of a flat license, or you are assembling something custom out of several actors. For those two jobs it is the stronger buy of the pair, and we would point you there ahead of our own product. A scheduled, unattended pipeline is something Lead Scrape simply cannot do. And a scraper that costs a few dollars twice a year beats an annual license that mostly sits unused.

Lead Scrape is the better choice if: you pull B2B contact data most weeks, and you would rather not price each field separately. Emails, tech stack and SEO metrics all come in the same license.

Apify Google Maps Scraper Reviews: What Users Are Saying in 2026

The Apify Google Maps Scraper actor lists a 4.8-star rating and 541,000 total users on the Apify Store, accessed July 2026. People like how fast it is to set up and how consistent the output is. The complaints are almost all about money or about the fields the actor never returns.

Positive Feedback Themes

Apify's G2 reviews praise the no-code setup: a basic scrape runs end to end in the web console without a line of code. Output quality draws the same kind of comment. JSON, CSV and Excel files arrive with consistent field mapping and need no cleanup before import. Proxy handling gets less attention and probably deserves more, because residential proxy management, IP rotation and retry logic all happen out of sight. Maintenance lands the same way. Compass runs the actor commercially, so when Google reshuffles the Maps DOM, the patch usually arrives within days, and you are not the one writing it.

Common Complaints and Frustrations

• You cannot forecast the bill. Credit-based billing makes monthly spend hard to predict. G2 reviewers flag that big jobs and enrichment add-ons drain credits faster than expected, and the free tier is gone in a few sessions.
• The meter never tapers. Every thousand records costs the same $4, whether it is your first of the year or your fiftieth. No volume tier flattens the curve, so a month where you scrape twice as much costs exactly twice as much.
• Nothing checks those emails. What comes back includes catch-alls, dead domains and role-based inboxes. Straight into a campaign, that export will damage your sender reputation.
• No enrichment past the listing. Tech stack detection is missing, along with SEO data, revenue and employee count. Getting those means chaining more actors or buying a second data provider, which adds cost on top of the cost you were already trying to control.
• The advanced side is not point-and-click. Scheduling recurring runs, chaining actors and pulling results through the API all assume you are comfortable with JSON config and REST endpoints. The web console covers your first scrape. Everything past that is developer territory.

Most of that list is what Lead Scrape was built around: one annual price, email verification in the box, tech stack and company size already in the export, and CRM connectors instead of custom API work.

Apify Google Maps Scraper vs Lead Scrape: Pros and Cons

Lead Scrape wins on cost, data depth, email verification, and ready-made CRM connectors. We checked both tools against reviews on G2 and Capterra. A G2 reviewer noted: "Of all the tools we use, LeadScrape returns the best data to reach out to prospects." Another Capterra reviewer wrote: "The amount of data you get for the price is unbeatable. Email verification built in saves us from paying for a separate tool." Both review sets were checked in July 2026.

Apify Pros

• Runs in the cloud, so there is nothing to install, and it works from any browser
• The API and the wider actor ecosystem are genuinely good if you are building something custom
• $5 in monthly credits, free, which is enough to find out whether it fits
• Proxy rotation and anti-blocking ship with the platform, so you never configure either

Apify Cons

• Cost climbs with every record once you are past light usage
• No volume tier, so 50,000 records costs ten times what 5,000 does
• No email verification. Tech stack detection and SEO metrics are absent too
• No outbound webhooks and no prebuilt CRM connectors. Getting records into a CRM means polling the REST API from Zapier or Make, or writing and then maintaining the glue code yourself
• Google Maps only

Lead Scrape Pros

• At 20,000 results a month, it is around $700 a year cheaper than Apify, and the gap widens above that
• Emails, tech stack, company size, revenue and SEO data all ship with the license, email verification included
• It runs on your machine, so there is no credit balance to watch and nothing to top up mid-job
• Ready-made CRM connectors for eight platforms, plus native webhooks for N8N, Zapier or Make
• Pulls from several business directories in a single search, widening the pool Google Maps alone returns

Lead Scrape Cons

• Windows and Mac desktop only. There is no cloud version and no Linux build
• No API and no actor ecosystem, so there is nothing here for a developer who wants to build their own pipeline
• You commit to a year up front, where Apify only charges you when you actually scrape

What Are Common Apify Google Maps Scraper Issues and How Do You Fix Them?

Thin results, runs that die partway through and a bill nobody saw coming are the three problems that surface most with Apify Google Maps Scraper. Usually the search was too broad or the credit balance ran out, and sometimes Google's anti-bot defenses just kick in mid-scrape. You ask for 5,000 records, the run finishes with 800, and the log reports that the actor completed successfully. Which is technically true and not much help.

• Fewer results than expected. Google Maps caps visible results at roughly 120 per query. Turn on grid-search to split the area into smaller zones, and get specific with the search term: "Thai restaurants in downtown Portland" beats "restaurants".
• The run fails or times out. Break large scrapes into smaller geographic batches and check the credit balance first. An empty balance stops the actor mid-execution.
• The same listing appears twice. Overlapping grid-search zones cause this. Deduplicate on Google Place ID after export, since it is unique per listing and the most reliable key you get.

How to Choose the Right Google Maps Scraper for Your Needs

Under roughly 5,000 results a month, Apify's $4 per 1,000 is the cheapest buy. Above that, Lead Scrape's flat $247 a year wins and keeps winning on every extra record. The other question is how much you need beyond a name and a phone number, because verified emails, tech stack and company size ship with one and are unavailable on the other. Everything else, cloud versus desktop included, is secondary to volume and data depth.

Questions to Ask Before You Commit

1. How many leads do I need per month? Under 500 records, the Apify free tier or a browser extension will probably do. Past roughly 5,000 a month, per-result pricing has already overtaken Lead Scrape's flat $247 a year, and it keeps going.
2. Do I need verified email addresses? Apify hands over raw emails with nothing checking them, so bounce rates climb if you go straight to outreach. Lead Scrape bundles email extraction and verification with every license.
3. Do I need tech stack, SEO, or company size data? Apify returns listing-level fields only (name, address, phone, website, rating). Lead Scrape adds technology stack detection, domain authority, and estimated revenue and headcount. See the full feature list for details.
4. Am I building a developer pipeline or a sales workflow? Apify's actor ecosystem is aimed at engineers assembling scraping chains out of API calls and JSON configs. The people downstream of those engineers are who Lead Scrape is built for: agencies and sales teams who want the data sitting in their outreach tool and would rather not write anything to get it there.
5. Do I need data from sources beyond Google Maps? Apify's actor scrapes only Google Maps listings. Lead Scrape queries multiple B2B directories in a single search, returning a broader set of results. For a wider view of available lead generation tools, see our full comparison.
6. How important is cost predictability? If you bill clients a fixed monthly retainer, a tool whose annual cost you already know is worth a lot. Credit-based scrapers put a variable line item in the middle of that, where flat-rate licensing does not.
7. Will I route leads into a CRM or outreach tool? If so, check whether the scraper offers native connectors. Lead Scrape ships with built-in CRM integrations for HubSpot, GoHighLevel, Pipedrive, Instantly, Smartlead, Lemlist, Umbrella, and Woodpecker, plus webhook support for connecting to N8N, Zapier, or Make.

When Free Tools Are Enough (and When They Are Not)

Free browser extensions stop at about 120 Google Maps results and give you no emails, let alone verified ones. They are worth roughly one afternoon of checking whether a niche has enough businesses in it to bother with. Open-source scrapers on GitHub cost nothing up front and then charge you in time: proxies to host, and a fix to write every time Google changes its page structure. Apify's free tier, at $5 in monthly credits, buys a few test runs and not much beyond that.

Free tools run out the moment you want a few thousand records a month, verified addresses, or leads arriving in a CRM without you moving them there. After that you are down to two pricing models: per result (Apify, Outscraper) or once a year (Lead Scrape).

Apify Google Maps Scraper Alternatives Worth Considering

The main alternatives to Apify Google Maps Scraper include Lead Scrape (flat-rate desktop tool), Outscraper (cloud pay-per-result), PhantomBuster (automation platform billed by execution time), Bright Data (enterprise web data platform), Octoparse (visual point-and-click scraper), HasData and Decodo (scraper APIs), Clay (sales enrichment platform), open-source Python scrapers on GitHub, browser extensions, and the official Google Places API.

The free end of that table (open-source Python scrapers, browser extensions) does not scale and returns nothing beyond the listing. At the other end, the official Google Places API is the most reliable source of the lot, and also the one that gets expensive fastest at volume. It does not return email addresses at all, which rules it out on its own for B2B lead generation at scale.

Apify vs Outscraper

Both charge by the record and both run in the cloud, so the decision is about breadth against focus. Apify is a general scraping platform where Google Maps is one actor among thousands. Outscraper is built around Google data specifically and prices it at $3 per 1,000, a dollar under Apify.

Pick Apify when the Maps pull is one stage of something larger and you expect to chain it to other actors, or schedule it, or call it from your own code. Pick Outscraper when Google data is the whole job and you would rather not learn a platform to get it. Neither verifies an email address, and neither reaches past Google into other directories, so on data depth they land in the same place. We wrote up that side of it separately in our Outscraper comparison.

Apify vs PhantomBuster

PhantomBuster bills by execution time, which makes the two hard to compare on price alone. Apify charges $4 per 1,000 results no matter how long the run takes. PhantomBuster charges for the minutes the automation spends running, whatever it comes back with.

That difference matters more than it sounds. Scrape a dense city centre and PhantomBuster looks cheap, because the records pile up fast per minute of runtime. A thinly populated county returns a fraction of the rows for the same hour of runtime and the same money. PhantomBuster's real strength is social platforms, and Maps is a secondary use case for it, so for local business data specifically Apify is the more direct tool of the two. Both leave you to sort out verification and CRM delivery yourself.

How Do You Turn a Google Maps Scrape Into a CRM-Ready Prospect List?

Four passes turn a raw Maps export into something you can actually prospect from: strip the duplicates, verify the addresses, add the people behind the company records, then push the survivors into your sending tool.

1. Deduplicate on Place ID. Grid search overlaps at the zone edges, so the same restaurant arrives two or three times. Google Place ID is unique per listing and survives a name change, which makes it the only key worth trusting for this.
2. Cut the listings that are no longer trading. Google carries closed businesses for months. A record with no website, no recent reviews and a disconnected number is usually one of them, and it costs you nothing to drop it now rather than after a rep has called it.
3. Verify every address before it reaches a sending tool. Catch-all domains and role inboxes will pass a syntax check and fail a real sending. This is the step that protects your sending domain, and it is the one people skip. Lead Scrape runs it automatically on every address it extracts.
4. Attach a named person to the company. A business record tells you a firm exists. It does not tell you who signs off on anything. Lead Scrape returns contact names, job titles and LinkedIn URLs alongside the company row, which is the difference between "info@" and a person you can actually address.
5. Deliver it where the work happens. An export sits in a downloads folder until something moves it. Push it straight into the CRM or sequencer through a native connector so the list arrives already segmented.

Apify covers step one and leaves you the other four. That is a fair trade if you have engineers and an existing pipeline to plug the gaps, and an expensive one if the gaps get filled by buying a verification tool, an enrichment tool and then writing the glue between them. The prospect list build process goes into more depth on sequencing this.

Is It Legal to Scrape Google Maps?

Scraping publicly visible business listings is generally lawful in the US and the EU, and US courts have held that collecting publicly accessible data does not by itself breach the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Two obligations survive that finding. Google's Terms of Service prohibit automated access, and any record naming a real person is personal data under GDPR and CCPA.

Whether scraping breaks the law, the separate question of Google's terms, and then whether you can lawfully hold what you collected all get run together constantly, when each one is answered independently of the other two.

On the first, the case usually cited is hiQ Labs v LinkedIn, where the US courts found that accessing publicly available data does not amount to unauthorized access under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. That is a narrow ruling about one statute, not a general license to collect whatever is visible.

On the second, Google's Terms of Service prohibit automated access and bulk collection from its services. Breaching them is a civil matter between you and Google, and day to day it shows up as rate limits, CAPTCHAs and IP blocks, which is exactly what a hosted actor spends its engineering budget absorbing. The official Google Places API is the sanctioned route, and that is a large part of why it is more reliable and costs more at volume.

The third question is the one that catches B2B teams out. A company address is business data. A named contact with a work email is personal data under GDPR, and under CCPA once California residents are in the file, which means you need a lawful basis for holding it, a retention period, and a process that actually honors deletion requests. Verification keeps a list deliverable, but it does not make the processing behind it compliant. We went through the practical side of this in more depth in our piece on web scraping for lead generation.

None of the above is legal advice, and the answer moves depending on where you operate and who you are contacting. Worth an hour with someone qualified before you scale a scraped list into an outreach programme.

What Is the Future of Google Maps Scraping in 2026?

Google keeps hardening Maps with CAPTCHAs, IP blocks and layout changes, and a self-hosted scraper turns into an ongoing maintenance commitment. Hosted platforms like Apify take that work off you and charge for it per event, so the more you enrich, the more you pay.

Raw extraction on its own is worth less than it was. A list of names and phone numbers is a starting point and nothing more. Verification and CRM delivery used to sit downstream of the scrape, and they are increasingly priced into the scraper itself. The 541,000 users the Compass actor had accumulated by July 2026 say something about how much local lead generation work now starts with a Maps pull. The legal side deserves a look before you scale up. A named person attached to a business record is personal data under GDPR, so any workflow that pushes scraped contacts into outreach needs checking against GDPR, CCPA and whatever applies where you operate. We went through where those lines currently sit in a separate piece on web scraping for lead generation.

Should You Choose Apify or Lead Scrape?

If you are a developer wiring up a custom pipeline and your volumes are low, Apify is the flexible option and the cheaper one. Prospect regularly and Lead Scrape returns more per record for a fraction of the annual spend: $247 covers unlimited scraping, verified emails, tech stack detection, CRM integrations, and webhook routing into N8N, Zapier or Make for the rest of the stack. Under about 5,000 records a month Apify comes out ahead on price, and above that figure the flat annual license wins on every extra record you pull.

Sources

• Apify Google Maps Scraper actor and pricing
• Apify: Google Maps Scraper pay-per-event pricing
• G2 reviews for Apify
• Capterra reviews for Lead Scrape
• G2 reviews for Lead Scrape
• HasData Google Maps scraper API
• Decodo scraper API
• Clay sales enrichment platform

Other Software Comparisons

• Outscraper vs Lead Scrape
• Apify Google Maps Scraper Vs Lead Scrape (this page)
• Lead Kahuna vs Lead Scrape
• D7 Lead Finder Review
• Lead Carrot vs Lead Scrape
• Lead Grabber vs Lead Scrape