Apify Reviews & Product Details

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.

my experience with Apify, it makes web data extraction very seamless and it is also surprisingly quite affordable to get those data. i love that it provides the option of building your own actors from scratch that you can then tailor to whatsoever task that you want (In my case, Content strategy and research). and it has a whole app store that provides ready to use actors for various tasks. i even saw actors for tasks that I didn't even know were possible to automate even tough I still didn't end up using them because they weren't relevant to my goal. but in essence, it's a well built platform and the experience is amazing. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

For me, it's the learning curve. I'd say it's somewhat steep especially for new or first time users. This is what I personally experienced. proper especially with the configuration setup and the interface being overwhelming at first but very detailed so I found it actually helpful the more I got used to it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The actor marketplace is has everything we need. There are already a lot of ready made scrapers for different things, so I don't always need to write the whole thing myself...The API and scheduling are also useful when we need the same data collected regularly... the pricing is really good and affordable... and its easy to use... Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Some actors are better than others. You sometimes need to test a few before finding one that handles the scraping properly and you need to keep an eye on usage, especially with large datasets. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I like most is the Actor marketplace and the MCP server, which lets me connect Apify to AI agents like Claude. Some community Actors vary in quality, but overall it's reliable and easy to integrate. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's hard to know the cost before running a big job, so sometimes the bill is higher than I expected. Also, some community Actors are not well maintained and stop working when the website changes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Apify is the only marketplace I've found that works as a true merchant of record for a solo, unincorporated developer — it handles buyer billing, payouts, and support, so I can publish a paid Actor and start earning without building a payments stack myself. The CLI/API deploy flow is fast once you know it, and the Apify Store's internal search actually surfaces a brand-new listing to real buyers on day one, which is rare for any marketplace. Automated QA test-runs published Actors and flags broken ones as "under maintenance" — it caught a failure of mine before users did. Actors expose input/output schemas that AI agents read directly, and the API covers builds, pricing and schedules, so my whole publish pipeline runs from CI. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Revenue and payout data are Console-only — most useful endpoints for reading back earnings, monetization, and payout status simply 404 on the public API, so you're stuck clicking through the dashboard instead of scripting it. Personal-account payout documentation is thin, and some account fields (bio, picture, payout billing info) can only be set through the Console, not the API, which breaks automation workflows that otherwise deploy and price actors end to end via CLI/API. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What stands out most for our web scraping and data extraction work is how much setup time the pre-built Actors save. Instead of writing scrapers from scratch for every new site, we can usually find an Actor that's already close to what we need and adjust it, which cuts our time-to-first-data from days to hours. Performance has been solid too — runs come back fast, which matters when we're pulling data on a regular cadence. It's also been easy to plug into our own pipeline — the API and standard output formats (JSON/CSV) mean we're not writing custom glue code, and it integrates well with Claude, so we can feed scraped data straight into an AI workflow without extra transformation steps. On pricing, the free tier made it easy to prove out value before committing any spend, which lowered the barrier to actually trying it against our real use case. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The graphical user interface could be more streamlined — navigating between Actors, runs, and storage sometimes takes more clicks than it should, and it can feel a bit cluttered when you're trying to quickly check on a job or find a specific dataset. A cleaner, more consolidated dashboard view would make it faster to manage things day-to-day. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Apify offers an incredible variety of scrapers, but what really stands out is how seamlessly it connects via MCP. Being able to trigger actors and pull high-quality data directly inside AI-driven workflows and agents has made data extraction faster, more practical, and truly automated end to end. They offer $5 in monthly credits, which is already enough to run some tests and extract quite a bit of information. For new users, you can get an extra $5 by completing tasks like following their page, among other things. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The initial learning curve can be steep. At first, the dashboard may feel overwhelming and confusing because of the sheer number of features, settings, and available actors. This can make it difficult for newcomers to quickly figure out which specific actor or setup best matches their particular use case. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Aside from the fact that it has a rich library of actors, I love their MCP connectors, which make it very easy to get AI agents to do things for me. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The store is deep but uneven per source. For Canadian real estate listings I ended up wiring three different community actors for the same site, because no single one returned everything I needed - one for search, one for enrichment, one for detail pages - each with its own input schema and field shapes. And there's no way to know what fields an actor actually returns until you pay for a run to find out, so I wrote my own probe script for that.

Cost visibility is the bigger gap. run-sync-get-dataset-items hands back the items but no usage figure, so in a multi-tenant app where I attribute spend per tenant, every dollar number I report is an estimate rather than a billed one. A place-name normalization bug on my side once tripled my paid runs on a daily cron and nothing flagged it. Returning usage on the sync endpoint, plus per-actor daily ceilings and a spend anomaly alert, would fix both. Synchronous runs are also slow enough that two of them plus enrichment crowds a 300s serverless function. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I really like how simple Apify makes web scraping. Their library of ready-made actors saved us a ton of time, and setting up custom scrapers was smooth and straightforward. Customer support has also been fast and helpful whenever I’ve gotten stuck. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

there's a slight learning curve if you're completely new to code, and pricing can scale up a bit fast if you run large scraping jobs constantly. but the docs and support make it pretty easy to handle. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.