Apify vs. Import.io

Apify is a good fit when a website is secured and you need resident proxies plus a real browser, but setting up all that software into a working configuration is difficult or you don’t want to spend time on it. Pre-built actors are suitable for regular, scheduled monitoring and comparing data changes between runs; you can also use external webhooks. It’s suitable for selling a parser as a product because payment and the product listing are handled through the store. The platform doesn’t provide detailed statistics on how end users are using my actors: you can see the statuses of runs, but there are no detailed logs. For static pages that can be handled by a short script run on a schedule, using actors may be overkill.

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

• 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.

• 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

• 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

• 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

Extremely easy when connected via MCP with Claude Co-Work. I do not really understand the Apify website itself. It's a bit confusing, but when I use Claude as an operator and translator, it is absolutely a game-changer. Whenever I have an issue, I ask Claude to connect to Apify and ask what the best way for me to do things is. Should I use the Google Maps scraper in this area or this area? Which one has the highest chance of giving me the best results that I need? Claude's code can completely simplify the whole process, which makes the whole thing a lot easier for me to make faster and better decisions. I do not know what I would do now without Apify. My business cannot even be a business without it.

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.

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

• 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.

• 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