Apify vs. Import.io

Apify excels at mass data tracking, like monitoring e-commerce pricing or scraping dynamic websites cost-effectively. Its pre-built automations are great for plugging data into automation stacks. It is less appropriate for simple, one-time tasks where a basic browser extension is faster, or for pure integration work where you just move data between standard apps without scraping the web.

We used Connotate as a data mining tool for web research as a teaching assistant for the College of Information Sciences and Technology. You could train agents to automatically gather data in a variety of ways, which I used in my own research. Connotate's analysis was not as useful to me as the data itself, because we were using it to inform us of trends rather than make decisions.

Incentivized

• I love how intuitive the interface is. Even without deep coding knowledge, I can set up workflows quickly. The ready‑made actors are extremely helpful and cover most of my use cases.
• Apify makes it incredibly easy to automate repetitive web tasks. The platform is stable, the actors run smoothly, and the logs give me full visibility into every step.
• Apify offers impressive flexibility — from custom actors to API integrations and scheduling options. It scales well even with large workloads, and the performance has been consistent.

Incentivized

• Scrapes specific parts of webpages
• Crawls pages and scrapes based on patterns you specify via examples
• Very effective and accurate when it comes to scraping data of large URL lists

Incentivized

• 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

• Stability. software frequently crashed previously.
• Training. Students had a had time understanding how to use the tool, and then where to use it.

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.

I do not think I would have the budget to use it currently. When using it previously, was working with the developers to improve the product and was given accounts at no cost

Incentivized

Apify is incredibly user friendly and has a very simple and direct dashboard that includes tool tips and onboarding for extra help. Plus support is always available when needed to assist with anything you cannot figure out or need help with.

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

If I would not have come across Apify I would have built my own scrapers and extractors but this would have been very time consuming and intense in maintenance so the main advantage was that it was working very quickly, it had all the scrapers I needed and it just kept working without any issues

[We selected Import.io because] They were top ranking in SEO. I will never work with them again though.

• Some tools have saved us more than 20 hours of work per week.
• In some cases, it has allowed us to earn more than $5,000 per client. The results speak for themselves.
• Para algunas empresas, la compra de bases de datos puede resultar muy costosa, y gracias a Apify, hemos podido crearlas por menos de 300 dólares.

• It really helped to collect large chunks of data from the web.
• When compared to writing a script from scratch, it is very simple to use for creating a web agent.

Incentivized