Apify vs. PrivateProxy

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.

• 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

• 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

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 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.

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.

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.

• 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.