Apify Reviews & Product Details

Pay-per-event monetization is the biggest win for us. We set a price per result, and Apify handles billing, payments and payouts, so we never had to build a payment system. We publish about 40 data tools on the Store and push updates from the CLI with one command. The API is fast and simple: our own backend calls our Actors (for example sanctions screening and media transcription) and gets results back in a few seconds. The Store also brings real users. A paying customer found our sanctions screening Actor there without any marketing from our side. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Some parts take time to learn. The monetization settings and Insights pages are not very intuitive at first, and account verification steps could be explained more clearly. As a developer I would like more detail when a user's run fails, so I can improve the Actor faster. The free monthly credit is also used up quickly when you maintain many Actors. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It plugs straight into n8n. I call the run-sync endpoint with one HTTP node and get the dataset back in the same step, so there’s no polling and no extra plumbing. I use the Instagram scraper and the Instagram profile scraper as the data layer for a daily lead radar I built for a gem dealer, and they’ve been reliable. The per-call spend cap (maxTotalChargeUsd) is the feature I value most, because a bad input can never run up a bill on a client build. Pay per result keeps it cheap: my first test read 30 profiles for about eight cents. The unexpected win was being able to export a run’s dataset and build the whole engine against that saved data, so weeks of development and testing cost nothing in scraping. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The free tier is tight once you’re building something real. Unnamed datasets are deleted after about a week, which nearly cost me my test data before I learned to export it straight away. A clear warning in the console when a dataset is about to expire would fix that. Some actors also carry their own run limits on top of your account’s limits, and the difference between the two isn’t obvious in the interface, so I lost time working out why a run was refused. Showing both limits side by side on the actor page would help. The step up to the paid plan is fair for what you get, but it comes sooner than expected once a workflow runs every day, so budget for it early. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Apify lets me run ready-made scrapers (Actors) without writing code. I connected it to Claude, so I describe what data I need in plain language and Claude runs the Actor and returns the results. Setup took minutes, and I did not need to learn a programming language or the platform’s console. Results come back as structured datasets that I can export to CSV for analysis. Pay-per-result pricing also makes costs easy to estimate before a run. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The free plan caps results at 10 items per run, so I could not collect a full dataset until I upgraded. The message after each run also pushes a paid plan, which is easy to miss. Actor quality varies: the Twitter/X scrapers differ a lot in price, reliability, and input options, and it takes time to compare them. Pricing per result is clear, but total cost is hard to predict before a large run. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Apify is really helpful if you’re unsure about what’s missing in your tech stack but still want a clear overview of the available tools that the best people in the market are using. It’s useful for data scraping and lead gen, and I definitely feel like I get my money’s worth. The pay-per-use option, or monthly subscriptions on individual actors, keeps things flexible for me, since I can choose a subscription when it makes sense and accept overages if I want to. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I don’t like that it requires a monthly subscription, and that if you have payouts, they only come once a week. Other than that the support can sometimes be slow but i've not had to contact them much tbh, the UI can be a bit cluttered but its managable, the integrations are present but limited. the performance is adequeate for my needs. the ai intelligence unforuntately is not currently useful Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I like most about Apify is how much time it saves me. I don’t have to build every scraping or automation workflow from scratch, I can start with an existing Actor, tweak it for my use case, and get things running pretty quickly. The flexibility is probably the biggest reason I keep coming back to it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The main thing I’d say is that there’s a bit of a learning curve when you first get started. With so many Actors, settings, and customization options, it can feel slightly overwhelming initially. Some of the more advanced workflows also take a little time to figure out. But once you get familiar with the platform, it becomes much easier to use. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I’m impressed by how fast it scrapes and how accurate the information it fetches is, with no hallucinations. It’s also easy to use alongside other applications like Google Sheets and Codex. In my view, the scraping charges are absolutely worth it, because if I had done the same work manually—or paid someone else to do it—it would have ended up being extremely expensive. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

After I started programming, I found it easier to use, but honestly it could be made simpler for everyone. There should be a step-by-step wizard that asks you questions and helps you build an actor without any coding. Alternatively, they could offer an agent who can understand the requirements and build an actor for you.

For people who don’t know what an actor is or what it does, I also think the term “actor” should be changed. They should use the word “scraper,” which is more familiar and easier to remember. When I used it for the first time, I didn’t know what an actor was, and I didn’t bother exploring it further. A simpler name, along with a simpler process for creating an actor, would make it much more approachable. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I'm a solo full-stack developer and I've used Apify for over a year to scrape Twitter/X accounts and posts, find leads on LinkedIn, and run my own Actor that scrapes Y Combinator jobs and companies. What I like most is that I can give one Apify API key to my coding agent (Claude Code) and it finds the right Actors in the Store and runs them for me. There's an Actor for almost anything, so I rarely build a scraper from scratch. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Pricing can get hefty, depending on which Actors you use. Most Actors are published by other people who set their own prices. For me, LinkedIn and Apollo scraping for lead generation, email validation and contact enrichment are usually the biggest costs. I understand that's not really Apify's fault, since they don't control what publishers charge. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Turnkey Actor Marketplace: The availability of pre-built scrapers for major sites (such as Google Maps, social media, and e-commerce platforms) removes the need to create custom scraping scripts from scratch.

Built-In Anti-Bot & Proxy Management: Features like automated residential IP rotation, browser fingerprinting, and CAPTCHA handling help scrapers run more reliably, without constantly breaking due to site blocks.

Serverless Infrastructure & API Integrations: Cloud-based execution takes care of scaling automatically, and the webhooks and REST APIs make it easy to send structured data straight into automation workflows (like n8n or Make.com), CRMs, and AI pipelines. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Unpredictable Usage Costs: Since billing is based on compute units, memory, and dynamic proxy usage, it can be difficult to estimate the exact cost of complex or large runs ahead of time.

Inconsistent Community Actor Quality: Scrapers created by third-party developers can vary widely in maintenance and reliability, and they may break when target websites change their layout.

Steep Learning Curve for Beginners: Although pre-built scrapers are straightforward to use, setting up custom JSON parameters, proxy settings, and dataset storage can feel overwhelming for non-technical users. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I like most about Apify is that it saves me a lot of time when I need to collect data from websites. I can usually find an Actor that already does most of what I need, set it up, and start getting results without building everything myself.

I also like that I can easily check each run and export the data when it's ready. Overall, it makes scraping and automation much easier to manage, especially for tasks I need to repeat regularly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The main downside for me is the pricing. Compute and proxy costs can get pretty high compared to some alternatives, especially when running larger or more frequent scraping jobs. I like the platform overall, but I do find myself keeping an eye on usage because the costs can add up quickly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Apify completely eliminated the operational burden of managing self-hosted Chromium clusters, proxy pools, and anti-bot bypasses. Deploying custom Python and Playwright crawlers via apify push takes minutes, while the built-in residential proxy rotation handles complex anti-scraping protections out of the box. That alone saves our engineering team roughly 20 hours each month in infrastructure maintenance.

The platform's AI and MCP tooling is exceptionally well-executed. Connecting @apify/actors-mcp-server allows our AI coding assistants to discover scrapers, validate input schemas, and run targeted jobs autonomously. Combined with ready-to-use Apify Store actors that we can chain directly using the Python SDK, our time-to-delivery for fresh web datasets dropped from several weeks to just a few days. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Community actors in the Apify Store vary widely in documentation quality and input schema consistency. Because different maintainers adopt different parameter conventions, chaining multiple third-party actors often requires custom schema mapping in our code. The web console UI would benefit from a built-in schema validator and standardized pagination parameters across community scrapers.

Pre-flight cost estimation on complex, large-scale scraping jobs can occasionally be difficult to predict before execution. While the pay-per-event pricing model is fair and transparent, having hard spending limits or automated dry-run budget calculators directly in the actor run dialog would give teams greater confidence against runaway costs. Better baseline documentation from third-party creators would also accelerate developer onboarding. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.