Apify vs. ZenRows

Apify is great for solo developers who want to monetize scraping tools without building payment or infrsturctre themselves and want to get paid for their products, it is also great for developers who are targeting niche markets, I built scrapers for African real estate data which has very little competition on the store, which makes it easier for my products to be found.

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

• 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.

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.

It's plug-and-play with coding agents - just select the actor, key in your API and get started. However, it is worth mentioning that the actual console view can get a bit too much for folks who aren't from a core technical competence - a simplified view might help folks like us.

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 is 100% better in every domain. Also, you have the option to choose another actor if this one doesn't work, whereas with Octoparse you are very limited to their provided actors or to creating your own, and it's a learning curve again. It's also way more expensive to use Octoparse, and it doesn't always work well.

• 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.