MapsScraper vs Outscraper: Pricing Compared (2026)

If you’re choosing between MapsScraper and Outscraper, the decision is less about features and more about how you want to pay and where the work happens. One is a flat-rate Chrome extension you install yourself; the other is a metered cloud service with a REST API. Neither is “better” — they fit different problems.

We sell MapsScraper, so the bias warning is up front. To compensate, the numbers below are from each tool’s public pricing page in May 2026, and Outscraper’s genuine strengths (API, multi-platform coverage, no-subscription billing) are documented honestly. If those matter more to you than the cost difference, Outscraper is the right call.

This guide covers the actual feature gap, total cost at a few realistic volumes, and a decision matrix at the end.

Short answer: Outscraper is a metered cloud service with a REST API: the first 500 places and 500 email domains are free every 30 days, then $3 per 1,000. MapsScraper is a browser extension with a flat $9.90/month (or $79/year) plan, emails included. With emails, MapsScraper is cheaper above roughly 2,150 leads a month (about 1,600 a month on the yearly plan); below that, or if you need an API, Outscraper costs less.

Quick comparison

Feature	MapsScraper	Outscraper
Free tier	50 leads/month (renewable)	500 businesses + 500 contact lookups every 30 days
Cheapest paid plan	$9.90/mo	Pay-as-you-go, no subscription
5,000 leads/mo cost	$9.90 (unlimited)	$13.50 places + $13.50 contacts = $27
Annual unlimited	$79/yr	Not offered (variable per use)
Format	Chrome extension (sideloaded)	Cloud SaaS + REST API
API	❌ No	✅ Yes
Email scraping	✅ Built-in (Premium)	Separate service, $3 per 1,000 domains
WhatsApp click-to-chat links	✅ Built-in (Premium)	❌ Not generated
Multi-platform (Yelp, LinkedIn, etc.)	❌ Google Maps only	✅ 50+ data sources
Setup	Sideload, developer mode	Web signup, in-browser dashboard
UI languages	10 (EN, ES, PT, DE, FR, TR, IT, PL, JA, KO)	Dashboard localized (~17 languages, follows browser language)

The table tells most of the story. Outscraper is the more flexible, developer-friendly tool. MapsScraper is the cheaper, single-purpose tool. Below, we put numbers behind both.

Pricing breakdown

Outscraper math

Outscraper bills per record, pay-as-you-go. Per Outscraper’s pricing page (checked September 2026), the first 500 Google Maps businesses are free, then it’s $3 per 1,000 up to 100,000 and $1 per 1,000 after that. Emails and contacts are a separate service with the same shape: first 500 domains free, then $3 per 1,000 domains. The free allowances and usage tiers reset every 30 days. (Our May 2026 version described the free 500 as a one-time signup credit. That was wrong; it renews.)

A few realistic scenarios, per 30-day window, after the free 500 of each service:

• 1,000 leads, no emails: $1.50
• 1,000 leads + emails: $1.50 + $1.50 = $3
• 5,000 leads + emails: $13.50 + $13.50 = $27
• ≈1k leads/mo + emails, all year: ~$36/yr
• 5k leads/mo + emails, all year: ~$324/yr

Outscraper is genuinely cheap at low volume. If you stay under 500 leads a month, you pay nothing. If you need 1,000 leads with emails twice a year, you’re paying about $6.

MapsScraper math

MapsScraper has two prices and one rule: pay it, get unlimited.

• Free forever: 50 renewable leads per month (no card, all filters, all speed modes, CSV export)
• Premium monthly: $9.90/mo for unlimited leads + email scraping + social media + WhatsApp link generation + Excel export
• Premium yearly: $79/yr ($6.58/mo equivalent — saves 33% vs monthly)

There’s no per-lead cost and no email surcharge. The same $9.90 buys 100 leads or 100,000 leads. Current prices are on MapsScraper’s plans page.

Break-even

At very low volume Outscraper wins; at high volume MapsScraper wins. The crossover depends on whether you need emails:

• Without emails: Outscraper stays cheaper until ~3,800 leads/mo (500 free + 3,300 × $3/1k ≈ $9.90)
• With emails: MapsScraper wins past ~2,150 leads/mo (places + contacts after the free 500 of each ≈ $9.90)
• Annual budget: MapsScraper’s $79/yr plan (unlimited) beats Outscraper once you pull more than ~1,600 leads a month with emails, every month (about 19,000 a year)

If you’re committing to ongoing lead generation rather than one-off jobs, the math swings to a flat subscription quickly. If you’re a developer pulling 200 records once a quarter via API, Outscraper is fine.

Feature comparison

API access. This is the cleanest reason to pick Outscraper. They expose a REST endpoint, return JSON, and document it well. MapsScraper does not — it runs in your browser, exports CSV/Excel, and that’s the whole product. If your workflow ends in a CRM import or a spreadsheet, you don’t need the API. If it ends in a custom pipeline (Airflow, Make, n8n triggers), you do.

Email scraping. MapsScraper visits each business’s website from your browser and parses contact pages, mailto links, and footer patterns. Premium feature, no surcharge. Outscraper offers the same outcome but bills it as a separate emails-and-contacts service at $3 per 1,000 domains after the first 500 free. At 5,000 records that’s an extra $13.50 a month on top of the base scrape, the same again as the scrape itself.

WhatsApp click-to-chat links. MapsScraper Premium generates wa.me/<E.164> links from the scraped phone numbers, ready to paste into outbound. Useful if your market is LATAM, MENA, Southeast Asia, or anywhere WhatsApp is the dominant business channel. Outscraper does not generate these; you’d need to format phones yourself.

Multi-platform. Outscraper scrapes 50+ sources — Yelp, Yellow Pages, LinkedIn, Facebook, TripAdvisor, and so on. If your prospecting depends on cross-referencing a Maps listing with a Yelp profile or a LinkedIn page, Outscraper does it in one place. MapsScraper is Google Maps only. That’s a real limit.

Setup. Outscraper is faster to start: signup at outscraper.com, pick a query, get a CSV in your dashboard. About 5 minutes from zero. MapsScraper is slower because we’re not on the Chrome Web Store — you download a ZIP, enable Developer Mode in chrome://extensions, click “Load unpacked,” and open the side panel. About 10 minutes if you’ve never done it. We cover this in the install guide, but it’s still friction.

Language support. MapsScraper’s UI ships in 10 languages (EN, ES, PT, DE, FR, TR, IT, PL, JA, KO). Outscraper’s dashboard is localized too: its web app ships translations for about 17 languages, Turkish included, and follows your browser language (seen in the app’s own code in September 2026; Outscraper’s docs don’t list them). Language isn’t what separates these two tools.

Setup experience

The five-minute version of each:

Outscraper:

1. outscraper.com → sign up with email
2. Confirm email, log in
3. Pick “Google Maps Search” service from dashboard
4. Enter query: "restaurants in Brooklyn", set limits
5. Click Run, wait, download CSV

MapsScraper:

1. mapsscraper.shop/install → download ZIP
2. Unzip somewhere permanent (not Downloads)
3. Open chrome://extensions, toggle Developer Mode top-right
4. Click “Load unpacked,” select the unzipped folder
5. Pin the extension, open Google Maps, click extension icon

Honest take: the sideload is friction. We’re not on the Web Store because the listing was rejected twice for policy reasons we couldn’t engineer around, so we ship directly. The trade-off is that you can inspect the code (it’s unobfuscated), get features faster (no store review), and you’re not blocked by Chrome’s auto-update cycle when we ship a fix. But the first install is 10 minutes, not 30 seconds, and that’s a real cost.

For most users this happens once. After that, Outscraper’s “log in every time” friction roughly equals MapsScraper’s “extension always loaded” convenience. But the first impression is in Outscraper’s favor.

Who should use which

Pick Outscraper if:

• You’re a developer or data engineer integrating scraping into a pipeline
• You need REST API access with JSON output
• You need multi-platform scraping (Yelp + LinkedIn + Maps in one tool)
• You do one-time bulk jobs and don’t want a subscription sitting on your card
• You’re on a team that needs a shared dashboard with audit logs
• Your volume is genuinely low (under 1,000 records, infrequent)

Pick MapsScraper if:

• You’re a solo founder, freelancer, or small team
• You’re Google Maps-focused (most B2B local prospecting is)
• You expect to scrape 2,000+ leads/month and want predictable cost
• You need WhatsApp click-to-chat links generated automatically
• You want the lowest possible total cost for ongoing lead generation
• You care that data lives in your browser, not in a vendor’s cloud

There’s also a third option: try both free tiers first. MapsScraper’s 50 leads/month renews; so do Outscraper’s 500 free businesses and 500 contact lookups every 30 days. If your test queries fit inside both, you can compare CSVs side by side before paying anything.

When the pipeline beats the tool

Whichever you pick, the lead generation step is rarely the bottleneck. The bottleneck is usually targeting (wrong industry, wrong geography, wrong size) or outreach (generic copy, bad timing, no warmup). We wrote a Google Maps lead generation playbook that walks through the full pipeline — applicable to whichever tool you use.

If you’re running into scrape throttles regardless of tool, our notes on scraping Google Maps without getting blocked cover the rate-limit fundamentals. Both Outscraper and MapsScraper respect Google’s limits internally; you can still hit problems if you’re trying to extract 10k records from one IP in an hour.

Conclusion

MapsScraper and Outscraper are not really competing in the same product category. Outscraper is a cloud platform with an API. MapsScraper is a browser extension with a flat subscription. The right choice depends on whether your workflow ends in a spreadsheet or in a Postgres table.

If you want to commit before testing, the rough rules are:

• Occasional jobs, under ~2,150 leads/mo with emails (the first 500 of each service are free every 30 days), or an API needed → Outscraper
• Steady volume above that, predictable cost, Google Maps focused → MapsScraper
• Multi-platform (Yelp/LinkedIn alongside Maps) → Outscraper
• WhatsApp click-to-chat workflow → MapsScraper

If you’d rather try first, the free tier gives you 50 leads/month, no credit card required. That’s enough to find out whether the data quality and CSV format fit your pipeline before you decide on either tool.

For a wider view, see our comparison of 5 Google Maps scrapers with real pricing, which adds Scrap.io, G Maps Extractor, and Leads Sniper to the picture.

Comparing other tools?

Looking at more than one option? Our list of Outscraper alternatives compares six Google Maps scrapers on pricing model, email extraction and API access.

If you’re choosing between Chrome extensions specifically, see the head-to-heads with the two closest competitors:

• MapsScraper vs G Maps Extractor — the biggest free tier in the category
• MapsScraper vs MapLeadScraper — same price band, different documentation