Apify vs. Smartproxy

It's absolutely essential. It's the first phase of my whole business workflow. Without Apify, I can't do anything else. It saves me hundreds of thousands of pounds and hours and weeks of work by not needing to manually look for prospects, specifically electricians in the UK, going town by town and qualifying and finding duplicate businesses spread across areas. The most annoying scenario for me is when I scan a whole county or a few towns in a small area. There are a lot of duplicates that show up because the websites and prospects do multiple areas, so sometimes Apify confuses that. I get a lot of duplicates, and I have to spend a lot of time de-duplicating. However, this is still way better than doing it manually, even with those setbacks. I could not live without it. It makes my life so much easier, saves me from having to hire a virtual assistant, and I would recommend it to anyone that needs data scraping fast and cheap and easy.

Incentivized

• They feature a massive actor library, so you don't have to build everything from scratch or maintain it.
• Scheduling + web hooks makes automating data collection super easy.
• Easy to scale from small tests to much bigger scraping jobs and fairly cheap to scale.

• 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

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.

The process of building, deploying and publishing an actor is straightforward once you understand the system. The console is organized properly and the documentation also covers most common scenarios. For beginners I belive this is the best platform if you are looking to getting into web scraping, it's easy to adapt after some time and you are able to use easily understandable and common languages such as Python or Javascript.

Incentivized

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

Apify has a cleaner interface, better documentation, and a lower learning curve for building and scheduling scraping workflows than Bright Data. The Apify Store has thousands of prebuilt Actors that can often be used immediately or customized with minimal effort. I also didn't need the extremely strong anti-bot measures from Bright Data at the time given the purpose.

• Apify has delivered great ROI from the sheer time saved by not having to do even short-ish tasks manually.
• By saving us from repetitive data entry, we can focus on much bigger things while Apify runs in the background.
• The risk-free actor pricing structure lets us test and deploy new automated pipelines with zero upfront commitment.