Apify vs. PitchBook

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.

Less suited for run-of-the-mill information on clients(LinkedIn is great for that), however, it is great for tracking company information. I wouldn't go anywhere else. The breadth of information given to me is extremely helpful. Sometimes it can be a pain point to acknowledge that when I am researching older companies that have been merged, it is difficult to find information about them, leading me to look to sources like Wikipedia for even the most basic description.

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

• Historical deal dynamics detailing pricing and financing as well as which parties worked on the transaction
• Initial screenign on public and private comparables
• Breadth of private companie details including descriptions, financials, etc.
• Ability to filter / sort and eventually export details on private companies

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

• The price is insane. Most of their competitors are free, and those that aren't are less than 5% the price of PitchBook.
• The excel plugin is incredibly complicated and the formula builder function is awful. You cannot search easily to find formulas for things you don't already know (unless you ask support)
• The UI is old, and they are slow to innovate. They need to add in a new incredible feature in the next year or two or my firm might move on, as it's getting harder to justify the price when competitors get better every year (signalnfx!) and PitchBook doesn't.

Incentivized

We rate Apify highly because it is easy to use and requires minimal monitoring. The platform offers ready-to-use Actors and workflow templates, enabling our team to launch data collection tasks quickly without extensive development. Once a workflow is configured and scheduled, it runs automatically in the background using Cursor or Claude Cowork, freeing our team to focus on analyzing results rather than managing the scraping process.

It was very easy to set up and remained very easy to use. I set it up once and did not have maintain it at all. It just kept working and it is doing its job which is exactly what I was looking for, a hassle free web data extractor

I think its a great platform as is. Its usable and we get most of the information as and when we need. I don't like the landing page after login, so I don't like to go to PitchBook every day to review daily updates on the industry. It's way too cluttered and requires MFA every time

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 overall support for PitchBook is about average. It is not excellent for two primary reasons. First, PitchBook can run slow from time to time, and I cannot copy and paste from the Chrome extension. I have found neither of those issues to be a function of the computer I am using. However, the PitchBook support team has proved helpful on several occasions.

Incentivized

At first, we were skeptical about how smoothly it would integrate into our workflow, but after running a few tests using Cursor IDE, the results were immediately positive. The setup was straightforward and required minimal effort. Our blog now fully relies on the Apify API to scrape SERPs, which has become a core part of our content and data pipeline.

did not participate

Incentivized

Apify is in a league of it's own in terms of flexibility and the ability to connect the API into lead generation automations on n8n or Make.com. The variety of actors available is much larger than most other scraping sources and for anyone looking for lead enrichment, it is definitely a great, cost-efficient resource.

CB Insights have a better market research functionality, offering pre-defined market definitions and proprietary framework for market analysis. They list all the significant players within a market and classify them into categories, which gives you a sense of who is doing well in the market. Also, it has a nice AI functionality where you can ask for a quick summary.

Incentivized

we can give access to anyone interested

Incentivized

• 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 has allowed us to be more targeted in our sales campaigns.
• Great headhunting and market mapping data.
• We have been in a very difficult hiring market so it hasn't given me the ROI I would have hoped, but that isn't PitchBook's fault!

Incentivized