Apify vs. Import.io

Very well suited for situations where I need well-structured data at scale, automating interactions with websites that do not provide an official API, and dealing with JavaScript-heavy pages. Less ideal for situations that require real-time data updates, or instant even even-driven processing. It's designed more for scheduled tasks.

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

• Social media scraping is phenomenal and allows you to have information practically in real time in seconds, which would otherwise be very laborious.
• Extracting data from a social network like TikTok also makes our data analysis much simpler.
• Extracting ideas from articles is now much easier, thanks to everything that can be achieved with the range of tools offered by Apify.

• 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

• sometimes the devs are working on one of the scrapers when it breaks and you don't really get a notice for that, it just doesn't work. Esp starts to be a problem when it's supposed to be running in the background.
• Loading cookies into the different actors is kind of a pain.
• vague pricing models. all the actors are priced differently, and the difference between "usage" "result" and "event" is pretty confusing

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

The site is laid out pretty well. There is a learning curve, but it is not steep. Integrations are fairly straightforward using the API and JSON files. Integrates well with Make automations, which is essential for our team and organization. I am pleased with the performance and flexibility of the platform.

Incentivized

I was very happy with the support I received from Apify. They are always ready to answer all your questions and help solve problems you have.

The reason we prefer Apify to other alternatives is that it has more functionality and APIs that serve different purposes. In addition, thanks to its libraries prepared for easy integration into many programming languages, it becomes very easy to integrate into every project in different languages. In this way, it deserves to be ahead of its competitors.

Incentivized

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

• No need to search for high-quality web-scrapers
• Its more costly than finding free solutions, but the advanced product of Apify will make up for that
• No need to worry about multiple different implementations for different products. You only have to care about the Apify implementation which saves you a lot of time

Incentivized

• 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