Apify

Apify is a full-stack web scraping and automation platform where developers build, deploy, and monetize scraping actors.

Overview

Apify is a cloud platform for web scraping, automation, and data extraction. Developers write scrapers as Actors—containerized programs that run at scale on Apify’s infrastructure—and the Apify Store offers thousands of ready-made scrapers for popular sites. Its proxy infrastructure and residential IPs handle anti-bot challenges, while scheduling and storage keep data pipelines running unattended. Crawlee, Apify’s open-source scraping library, underpins much of the ecosystem.

Apify’s marketplace model creates a two-sided economy: developers publish scrapers for popular sites, and users get working extraction without writing code. This dramatically shortens time to data for common sources, while the platform still supports fully custom actors when requirements are unusual.

Operational concerns are handled for you: proxies rotate, retries resume failed runs, and datasets remain queryable long after a crawl finishes. For teams building AI applications, that reliability matters as much as raw capability, since training and RAG pipelines depend on fresh, structured web data.

Actor development uses familiar web technologies, and the platform handles deployment, scheduling, and scaling so solo developers can ship tools that would otherwise require infrastructure work.

Key Features

• Apify Store with thousands of prebuilt scrapers and automation actors
• Crawlee open-source library for Node.js scraping and browser automation
• Managed proxy pools including residential and datacenter IPs
• Dataset storage, scheduling, and webhook delivery for pipelines
• Integrations with Slack, GitHub, Zapier, and cloud storage
• Actor monetization so developers can sell scrapers in the marketplace

Pricing

Apify has a free tier with monthly credits. Paid plans scale by compute units and proxy usage, with enterprise options for dedicated infrastructure and support.

Who Is It For

Developers and data teams extracting structured data from the web at scale, and builders who want to monetize scraping tools in a marketplace.

Documentation and examples are extensive, and community actors cover sources that would otherwise take days to build.

FAQ

Is Apify free to use?

A free tier provides monthly credits for small projects; heavier usage requires a paid plan based on compute and proxy consumption.

Does Apify offer an API?

Yes, Apify is API-first: actors can be run, scheduled, and queried via REST API, and datasets are accessible programmatically.

How does Apify compare to alternatives?

Apify combines scraping infrastructure, proxies, and a marketplace where Bright Data focuses on proxy networks and Octoparse on no-code extraction. Credits roll over within billing periods, and the actor marketplace keeps expanding with community-built scrapers for new sources.