Apify vs. Dexi.io with Mozenda

It's absolutely essential. It's the first phase of my whole business workflow. Without Apify, I can't do anything else. It saves me hundreds of thousands of pounds and hours and weeks of work by not needing to manually look for prospects, specifically electricians in the UK, going town by town and qualifying and finding duplicate businesses spread across areas. The most annoying scenario for me is when I scan a whole county or a few towns in a small area. There are a lot of duplicates that show up because the websites and prospects do multiple areas, so sometimes Apify confuses that. I get a lot of duplicates, and I have to spend a lot of time de-duplicating. However, this is still way better than doing it manually, even with those setbacks. I could not live without it. It makes my life so much easier, saves me from having to hire a virtual assistant, and I would recommend it to anyone that needs data scraping fast and cheap and easy.

Incentivized

The Mozenda platform is well suited to some specific scenarios that may work well for your organization. It is especially helpful for basic scraping of information from simple websites. If the information you need to obtain is clearly stated on a website, then Mozenda is a simple solution to capture that data quickly and easily.

Incentivized

• They feature a massive actor library, so you don't have to build everything from scratch or maintain it.
• Scheduling + web hooks makes automating data collection super easy.
• Easy to scale from small tests to much bigger scraping jobs and fairly cheap to scale.

• Action Items. Mozenda is broken down into a series of actions that can be performed on a page. Some actions take you to other pages. The action list, while short, provides a comprehensive set of tools for scraping just about any website (I haven't met one where it didn't work yet).
• Error Handling. I've used some scraping tools that have virtually no error handling. Mozenda has great error handling; the software almost always pinpoints the exact action where the agent failed and why.
• Speed. Mozenda is very fast at obtaining results. Other "bot" software can be slow and cumbersome but Mozenda plows through pages rapidly and accurately aggregates information.
• XPath compatibility. One of the most powerful features of Mozenda is the integrated ability to use XPaths to get at the exact bits of information we're after on a particular website. Access to visible information is only limited by imagination.

• I think monetization part needs some improvement. Sometimes it stops working.
• Second issue is that when you run actor locally on your device using Apify run command, it runs fine and does not show errors. However, when you run on Apify platform, it starts showing error that this python based library is not supported etc. I think, error logging needs to be improved.
• Issue support is very slow. If you create an issue it takes a lot of time that somebody reply.
• Automated testing also needs to be improved. Testers run simple tests and if extra keys are used or something else, test is failed.

Incentivized

• The user interface for managing agents can be improved
• When websites change, the agents could be better at dynamically updating
• The "credit" usage can be confusing

Incentivized

It's the best because you can just load in a limited amount of money and limit your financial exposure to using a tool like this. so renewing isn't a big consideration... i know that i'm going to need the tool in the future and i'll load it with money accordingly when im ready.

The process of building, deploying and publishing an actor is straightforward once you understand the system. The console is organized properly and the documentation also covers most common scenarios. For beginners I belive this is the best platform if you are looking to getting into web scraping, it's easy to adapt after some time and you are able to use easily understandable and common languages such as Python or Javascript.

Incentivized

We never needed to contact support directly because the platform was always clear and easy to use. The documentation is thorough, there are plenty of how-to guides, and YouTube.

1. Strategy for Anti-Blocking & Proxies 2. Cost Optimization (Compute Units) 3. Data Management & Storage

Incentivized

Apify has a cleaner interface, better documentation, and a lower learning curve for building and scheduling scraping workflows than Bright Data. The Apify Store has thousands of prebuilt Actors that can often be used immediately or customized with minimal effort. I also didn't need the extremely strong anti-bot measures from Bright Data at the time given the purpose.

I'm only personally experienced with UBot Studio and Scrapy. UBot Studio isn't a bad application, though it has quite a large number of bugs when compared to Mozenda. UBot touts itself as low-code, but requires a significant understanding of programming logic to use the program effectively. Using UBot, we were able to get virtually all the results we wanted, but at a much higher labor cost than Mozenda. During initial implementation of UBot, it took me a full week to develop a particularly complicated agent. Using Mozenda, I was able to recreate the same agent in 4 hours. The ROI has been remarkable, and Mozenda really is a low-code platform.

• Apify has delivered great ROI from the sheer time saved by not having to do even short-ish tasks manually.
• By saving us from repetitive data entry, we can focus on much bigger things while Apify runs in the background.
• The risk-free actor pricing structure lets us test and deploy new automated pipelines with zero upfront commitment.

• Stay relevant in the market
• Ensure product placement against competitors
• Dramatically enhance profitability

Incentivized