#1 most frequent
United States of America
61.4%70 installations of 114
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.
Categories & Use Cases
Media
1 / 5
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
#1 most frequent
Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services
37.7%43 installations of 114
“Whether you’re scraping websites, automating data collection, or building scalable agents, Apify makes the process incredibly smooth.”
#2 most frequent
Information
20.2%23 installations of 114
“The interface is intuitive, and the ready‑made actors cover almost everything I need.”
#3 most frequent
Educational Services
7.9%9 installations of 114
“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.”
#2 most frequent
Canada
7.0%8 installations of 114
#3 most frequent
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
5.3%6 installations of 114
Pros
- Robust web scraping, capable of handling challenging sites and social media platforms
- Diverse web scraping functionalities, including email and job posting extraction
- Intuitive interface and ease of use for quick workflow setup
Cons
- Complex and unpredictable pricing models, especially due to credit-based systems
- Inconsistent quality and functionality of pre-built actors
- Documentation and learning resources can be difficult to navigate
Great Tool.
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
Great tool that saves me time every day.
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
Apify is the place to go for all data and content scraping
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
I love Apify for content scraping and skip tracing! an incredibly simple user interface with a ton of prebuilt scraping tools to find all the data and content you could ever need. Extremely affordable and great support anytime you need it. Highly recommended to any SaaS builder, vibe coder or small business owner needing quality data.
Pros
- Skip tracing
- Content scraping
- social media profile scraping
Cons
- I would love to see a $79/month plan added
- some clarity around actors when there are multiple for the same purpose
Return on Investment
- Apify has made it possible for my product to exist. without the data it would not be possible.
Usability
Other Software Used
VIKTOR, ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude
The Ultimate Tool for Data Scraping and Automation
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
Powerful Data Extraction with a Learning Curve
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.
