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Apify

Score8.9 out of 10

401 Reviews and Ratings

What is Apify?

Apify is a platform for web data extraction and automation. The core component is the Apify Store, a marketplace where developers can publish and monetize serverless cloud programs called Actors.

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Categories & Use Cases

Media

Screenshot of a marketplace of 10,000+ ready-made Actors for scraping Amazon, Google Maps, social media, tracking prices, and generating leads.
Screenshot of Actors, which feature an auto-generated UI for setting their input.
Screenshot of the Actors' scheduling and integration interface, where users can connect them with platforms such as Zapier, the Google Suite, GitHub or feed LLMs through LangChain and LlamaIndex.
Screenshot of web scraping templates that can be used to build Actors. Users can also import existing code from a Git repo and publish a project in the Apify Store and earn passive income.
Screenshot of Crawlee, Apify’s open-source web scraping library used to build reliable web scrapers that don’t get blocked. Available in Python and Node.js

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Screenshot of a marketplace of 10,000+ ready-made Actors for scraping Amazon, Google Maps, social media, tracking prices, and generating leads.

Who Buys & Uses Apify

Apify Reviews

What users are saying about Apify.
View all Apify reviews

Pros

  • Efficient web and data scraping, even from complex or anti-scraping sites
  • Intuitive interface and simplified workflow for task setup
  • Strong API and integration capabilities with other automation tools

Cons

  • Complex and opaque credit-based pricing model, difficult to budget at scale
  • Steep learning curve and confusing user interface for new users
  • Inconsistent reliability and support for some third-party actors

Apify is a game changer and now I cant live without it.

Incentivized
Adam PearceView profile
Founder in Marketing at Nero Engine (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Before, I was manually searching Google Maps and different websites to try and find data on electricians and trying to find a hundred prospects to send outreach emails per day. Then I found Apify, and I used the Google Maps Scraper to do it for me when connected with Claude. Then Claude puts it: the listing's a notion for me. I was surprised how much easier it was and how much time it saves me. I was thinking about hiring a virtual assistant to do it for me, but now I found Apify. It saves me probably hundreds of thousands of dollars in having to pay someone to do the work for me. Now there's no way I can go back because it was so painful doing it manually. Now all the work gets done for me in an hour, which would normally take me probably a week. The only problem I'm facing now is that I want to do more, but I can't afford to upgrade my plan yet. It's still an absolute game-changer, and I can't live without it. I need roughly 500 prospects scanned per week, which is 2,000 per month. Not a chance I'm doing that manually again.

Pros

  • Ease of use
  • Fast
  • Dark mode

Cons

  • Cheaper
  • More results for a cheaper price.
  • Easier to explain in simple terms for beginners

Return on Investment

  • Saved me a lot of time
  • Saved me money
  • Save me from hiring virtual assistants
  • Save me wasting time on repetitive tasks
  • Save me headaches on stupid tasks like de-duplicating prospects

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Notion, Claude Code, Anthropic Claude, Wispr Flow, Final Cut Pro and HighLevel

Other Software Used

Anthropic Claude, Notion, YouTube Live, HighLevel, Wispr Flow

Apify brilliant marketplace for scrapers with some room for improvement.

Dylan Angleton
Co-Founder in Professional Services at Rocketfuel Digital (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Apify for several use cases in our business, but the main ones are collecting data from sites that don't have good/reliable API endpoints. It feeds into our AI workflows, so I'm not manually copying info all day. We run a few actors every day for prospecting and research, and it's saved a lot of time. Setup was pretty easy once we got used to it, although some actors need tweaking when websites change.

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • Better debugging: when an actor fails, the logs can be pretty overwhelming, especially if it's a Playwright browser issue. would be nice if it highlighted the actual root cause instead of digging through hundreds of log lines.
  • Versioning could be cleaner; sometimes you're not 100% sure which actor version you're running or what changes between releases. Better change logs and rollbacks would help.
  • Actor discovery can be a bit messy. There are loads of community actors, but quality varies a lot, so better verification, a rating system, and maintenance indicators would make it easier to know which ones are worth spending your credits on.

Return on Investment

  • ROI has definitely been positive for us, and I would say the biggest thing is time savings: instead of spending hours developing our own scrapers, we can just rent them from people who have built them before and are skilled at it.
  • It also lets us automate a lot of our prospecting workflows. We use it to collect data and feed it into our AI systems and enrich leads automatically.
  • We've been able to test ideas way quicker. Rather than spending days building infrastructure first, we can validate whether a data source is even worth using before investing more time in the project.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Octoparse

Other Software Used

ClickUp, Miro, Spark Mail App

The best platform Ive found for solo developers to monetize data products

Incentivized
Asher Samwaka
Founder & Team Lead in Information Technology at Ahulu Technologies (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Apify as a solo developer to build and monetize web scraping actors on the Apify Store. My main use case is extracting property listing data from Property24 accross 10 African countries, covering prices, locations, bedrooms, and more. The platform solves the problem of infrastructure, proxy rotation, cloud execution, dataset storage and billing as they are all handled by Apify so I can focus on the scraper logic itself. I've published 3 actors and successfully recieved my first Apify payout

Pros

  • Actor Monetization Infrastructure makes it easy to set my prices and recieve payouts without having to build a separate payment infrstructure myself.
  • Actor Store Distribution without much marketing on my part.
  • Amazing developer support team that is always there to help.

Cons

  • It's not clear how free-tier credit consumption translates to payable income. I spent months tracking analytics that showed revenue figures which turned out not to generate actual payout invoices.
  • The automated testing that flags actors as "under maintenance" is poorly documented. I had multiple failed builds before finding out that input schema default values are required for the tests to pass. This cost me store visibility while I figured it out.
  • The $100 minimum payout threshold isn't displayed anywhere obvious for the developers. I only discovered it by digging through documentation after wondering why my earnings weren't being paid out.

Return on Investment

  • I received a payout of more than $200 from a single month where I had paying users. I built and developed the scraper, Apify handled billing and payout. As a developer based in Namibia, receiving an international USD payout to my account was genuinely significant. The platform removed most barriers that would normally stop an African developer from monetizing software internationally
  • Building on Apify got me published on their official blog, which is the kind of credibility that is hard to get as a 23 year old developer in Namibia. That article is now indexed on Google and has already driven more visiblity to my actors than anything else I've done. It has become a portfolio piece that I reference in job applications and client conversations.
  • I am building my own software company. Having live monetized products on an international platform, a published article, and a track record of international payout gives the business credibility it wouldn't otherwise have at this stage.

Usability

Other Software Used

n8n, Firebase, GitHub, Claude Code

Great Tool.

Maxime HamonView profile
Operations Manager in Product Management at Runwayy (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have many uses for Apify. Our main use is scraping databases and other websites that would take hours manually, or also hours to set up a custom script to handle. We also use it to fetch timely information for our dashboards. This is a task that used to require a virtual assistant.

Pros

  • Scrape Websites and platforms often without going through the hassle of an api.
  • Automate and schedule those tasks and play nice with AI agents.
  • Quickly add new platforms to scrape from.

Cons

  • Not super straightforward and can be unintuitive at first.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Usability

Apify is excellent for scaping it has exceptional value.

Andrea Greco
developer in Information Technology at creareweb (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I have been using Apify for over a year while testing with various providers, and I find It to be the most suitable for the features I need. The option to test actors in dashboard gives immediately a clear picture about the usage. Also, as a mid-range developer, it helps to have examples and JSON code to refer to, as well as the logs. I use a lot of AI coding tools to assist me in creating Supabase functions for use with Apify actors, and having clear references helps a lot.

Pros

  • Scrape reviews.
  • Scrape products.
  • Scrape social network for comments and post.
  • Provide clear references in logs.

Cons

  • The store for all actors is an important feature. I would like a better way to understand which actors are failing or underperforming.

Return on Investment

  • I am starting my project, and the free tier has been valuable for me to get real usage.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Bright Data and ScrapingBee

Other Software Used

Lovable, GitHub, Netlify

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