Apify

Score8.8 out of 10

288 Reviews and Ratings

What is Apify?

Apify is a full-stack web scraping and automation platform that helps anyone get value from the web. At its core is Apify Store, a marketplace where developers build, publish, and monetize automation tools called Actors.

Actors are serverless cloud programs that extract data, automate web tasks, and run AI agents. Developers build them using JavaScript, Python, or tools like Crawlee, Apify's open-source web scraping library. Build an Actor once, publish it to Store, and earn when others use it. Apify handles all the infrastructure, billing, and monthly payouts.
For everyone else, Apify means never building from scratch. Apify Store features 10,000+ ready-made Actors for extracting Amazon product data, scraping Google Maps listings, monitoring competitor prices, pulling social media content, generating leads, and hundreds of other use cases.
Behind the scenes, Actors handle proxy rotation, CAPTCHA bypassing, JavaScript rendering, headless browsers, scaling, storage, and scheduling. Everything runs on Apify's cloud infrastructure with 99.95% uptime. The platform is SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, and CCPA compliant, and boasts users at companies and organizations such as Intercom and the European Commission.
Actors are run through Apify Console and can be integrated with Zapier and Make, or connected to AI frameworks like LangChain and Hugging Face to feed LLMs and vector databases. Apify also provides an MCP server that lets AIs like Claude discover and use Actors as tools dynamically. This means an AI agent can ask "find the top 10 Czech restaurants in San Francisco" and automatically use the right Actor to scrape Google Maps for that data.
Use cases include competitive intelligence for tracking prices across e-commerce, lead generation for extracting and enriching business contacts, market research to gather reviews and social media sentiment. Users can monitor SEO to track rankings and backlinks, and AI training to crawl websites for LLM context.
Apify has residential and datacenter proxies, browser automation with Puppeteer and Playwright, automatic retries, error handling, monitoring dashboards, and APIs for integration. Schedule runs to keep data continuously updated. Export to JSON, CSV, Excel, Google Sheets, databases, or push directly into workflows.
Beyond Apify Store, the Professional Services team builds and maintains custom solutions. Enterprise customers get dedicated data experts, custom integrations, and long-term project maintenance.
The free tier includes $5 in prepaid monthly platform usage. Paid plans scale based on compute power, storage, and proxy usage.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

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

1 / 5

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

#1 most frequent

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

38.3%

44 installations of 115

“Whether you’re scraping websites, automating data collection, or building scalable agents, Apify makes the process incredibly smooth.”
— owner, leadrevive (1-10 employees)

#2 most frequent

Information

19.1%

22 installations of 115

“The interface is intuitive, and the ready‑made actors cover almost everything I need.”
— Business development, Broadcast media (11-50 employees)

#3 most frequent

Educational Services

7.8%

9 installations of 115

“the time saving here is unimaginable - imagine trying to build a scraper for every site that you needed and maintain all of them: disgusting. Instead, we get to use Apify.”
— Founder, Reply Factory (1-10 employees)

Maxime Hamon View 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

Petar Valchev

Business development in Research & Development at Broadcast media (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Apify has saved me a huge amount of time. The interface is intuitive, and the ready‑made actors cover almost everything I need. I like that I can set up workflows without writing complex code.

Pros

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.

Cons

Some advanced features require a bit of a learning curve, especially for users without a technical background.

Return on Investment

Apify has had a very positive impact on our business objectives, mainly by reducing the time and cost of collecting large volumes of data. Tasks that previously took several hours of manual work — such as gathering emails, phone numbers, and website data — can now be automated and completed in minutes. This has resulted in at least a 70–80% reduction in operational time for these processes.

Usability

Wasim Safdar View profile

Senior Software Developer in Information Technology at QK Labs (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

One of my friends in Denmark wanted to search for startups in the EU startup marketplace "TheHub". Then he introduced me to Apify. Apify seems interesting to me, therefore I started learning this platform and also started developinga crawler for "TheHub". Apify surprised me a lot because it gives developers the independence to build an Actor that meets their needs and provides a serverless platform where they can earn passive income. As an independent developer and entrepreneur, this is a golden opportunity to test my skills and innovate something. Most exiting thing is that you can easily integrate its API endpoints into other applications or frontend and also connect to the MCP server to the MCP clients.

Pros

AI orchestration
Crawling and collecting data
A server that you can run without any tension to manage anything

Cons

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.

Return on Investment

I am a freelancer, and its crawlers helped me to search connections and do lead generation.
Participating in the $1M challenge is fun, and I will continue to develop even after this.
Great for passive income for independent developers and also for the business owners

Usability

Alternatives Considered

n8n

Other Software Used

n8n, Microsoft Visual Studio, OpenAI API Platform

Ben Schiller

Project Manager in Information Technology at Xspaces (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Apify to pull real estate data at scale for my wholesale real estate business including property listings, owner information, and market comps across multiple markets. It's replaced expensive third-party list services and manual research that used to take days. Now I get better, more comprehensive data in minutes, and I've been able to expand into new markets without hiring anyone for data sourcing.

Pros

The Actor library is the main feature. It covers most of the sites I target without needing to build anything from scratch.
The output data format is well structured. This makes it easy to integrate into my existing workflow without additional parsing.
The quality of data is excellent. Valid and up-to-date. No worries of garbage in garbage out.

Cons

The initial user interface can be intimidating.
Pricing for different Actors can be confusing.
Some terms like "compute units" take a while to fully understand how they image usage.

Return on Investment

The time automated scraping saves versus manual data extraction makes the product pay for itself immediately.
Buying expensive outdated lists is not longer necessary.
Newer, fresher data puts me in touch with more deal opportunities.

Usability

Saimun Amin

Agency Owner in Marketing at Amin's Media (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Has helped me save so much money and time on gettings leads for my agency business. I used to spend hours and hours trying to get leads or having to hire VA's that would take forever to scrape through Google maps to find leads for my business. Now I can just set up a bot to do it for me.

Pros

Beginner Friendly
Easy to understand and set up
Integrates well with make.com

Cons

I have an issue with the webscraper that doesn't allow me to control the actual amount of crawl depth per page.
I wish there was a way to avoid duplicate results

Return on Investment

I save hundreds of dollars a month from VA's doing this via software
I can get 100s of contacts in under an hour

Usability

Import.io

Zyte

ScrapeStorm

Apify

What is Apify?

Categories & Use Cases

Media

Most Frequent Users

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

Information

Educational Services

Apify Reviews

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Apify Alternatives