Overview
Apify has grown from a small scripting toolkit into a full cloud platform for orchestrating complex web data operations. Teams can publish a scraper once and then schedule it, collaborate on inputs, and stream results into data warehouses without maintaining any infrastructure. The marketplace of reusable actors, quick-start templates, and integrations with orchestration tools like n8n or Zapier keep workflows moving quickly. Support for headless browsers, proxies, robust error handling, and automated retries makes it easier to keep uptime steady even on dynamic websites. Product managers appreciate the granular usage dashboards and alerting, while engineers lean on TypeScript SDKs and a well-documented REST API. Dedicated compliance reviews, GDPR tooling, and audit logs round out the enterprise story. Whether you are running a single recurring crawl or operating a multi-team scraping function, Apify packages the infrastructure, governance, and marketplace ecosystem needed to ship faster without reinventing the stack.
Apify is a powerful cloud web scraping and automation platform that lets you build, run, and share scrapers at scale with enterprise-ready tooling.
Key features
Actor marketplace with community and private deployments
TypeScript SDKs and REST API with webhooks
Integrated scheduling, monitoring, and dataset hosting
Team workspaces with granular usage analytics
Pros
- •Extensive library of prebuilt actors covering popular sites
- •Robust scheduling, retries, and proxy rotation baked in
- •Comprehensive documentation and active developer community
- •Usage-based pricing keeps experimentation affordable
Cons
- •Complex workloads may require TypeScript expertise
- •Advanced compliance reviews reserved for higher tiers
- •UI can feel dense when managing large fleets of actors
Pricing & plans
Free
$05,000 compute seconds, 1 GB data transfer, and access to public actors for evaluation.
- •Community support
- •Public actor templates
- •Shared proxy pool
Pay-as-you-go
From $49Scale usage with transparent per-compute-second pricing and dedicated proxy add-ons.
- •Priority support
- •Dedicated residential proxies
- •Custom webhooks
Enterprise
CustomCompliance reviews, private networking, and SLA-backed support for regulated teams.
- •VPC peering
- •Audit logging
- •Dedicated success manager
Capabilities
Core strengths
Supported tech stack
CAPTCHA handling included
Integrated proxy management
Use cases
Integrations & ecosystem
Alternatives & competitors
Bright Data
Enterprise proxy network with managed data delivery.
Octoparse
Template-driven no-code crawler for business teams.
ParseHub
Desktop-first visual scraper with cloud scheduling.
Zyte
Managed data extraction and smart browser tooling.
Browserless
Hosted headless browsers for custom scraping stacks.
Screenshot gallery
Setup guide
- 1
Create an Apify account
Sign up with email or SSO, choose your workspace, and verify billing to unlock higher quotas.
View resource - 2
Install the Apify SDK
Use npm or yarn to install the TypeScript SDK locally so you can build and deploy custom actors.
View resource - 3
Configure an actor
Define your crawler logic, set environment variables, and connect inputs via key-value store or API.
- 4
Schedule and monitor runs
Launch your actor on a schedule, set alerting thresholds, and integrate datasets with downstream tools.
Changelog
2024-10-18
Usage anomaly alerts
Added configurable notifications for spikes in actor compute seconds and proxy consumption.
2024-09-05
Private actor secrets vault
Team admins can now manage environment secrets centrally with rotation reminders.
2024-07-22
Improved dataset streaming
Datasets stream to Snowflake and BigQuery with automatic schema inference.
Frequently asked questions
Yes. The public actor marketplace includes hundreds of maintained scrapers that you can fork, schedule, or extend without writing code from scratch.
Apify supports headless Chrome and Playwright, session storage, cookie management, and rotating proxies to work with logged-in or highly dynamic experiences.
Usage-based plans charge for compute seconds, storage, and proxy traffic. Enterprise agreements add predictable monthly minimums, SLAs, and private networking.