Apify vs. Import.io

I used other platforms such as n8n and make.com, and Apify seems more reliable because it is built for real developers. It gives much more independence than other platforms. Maybe in terms of storage and processing speed needs to be improvement for AI-generated content.

Incentivized

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

• Some actors are very expensive and offer limited value - $120 / month before event charges? That's insane. The monthly price also isn't listed in the main search screen, so you need to go in manually to each actor to ascertain how much it really costs
• Some actors often break after a while and you need to start searching for new ones... but I guess that's the price for relying on 3rd party actors in your marketplace
• The review/quality process isn't great to navigate when looking for a new tool.

• 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

Can be better better usage and better guides. For a platform so great, there are so so many ui/ux usage that can actually help in the retention of the platform’s users.

Though with some usage you start getting around as well. But it does require some time to segment the right actors

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.

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

Incentivized

Apify does its own thing and delivers value based on its core features, but I still rate Apify as my number one platform for finding and using web scrapers. In terms of how it stacks, I use Apify alongside Bright Data for web research workflows.

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

• results-based pricing is huge - across the whole platform I can try different actors and not have to change payment plans all the time
• the time saving here is unimaginable - imagine trying to build a scraper for every site that you needed and maintain all of them: disgusting. Instead, we get to use Apify.
• $39/mo to scrape any data off the internet = crazy ROI

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