What I like best about Apify is its flexibility. It can be used not only for web scraping, but also as a part of larger automation workflows with Make, n8n, Zapier, Apps Script, Python, and cloud services. I also like the proxy setup, reusable Actors, scheduling, API integrations, and the ability to quickly prototype data collection workflows for web, Google search results, social media, and reach metrics. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I dislike is that some advanced settings are not always obvious during the initial setup. For example, input schemas do not always clearly show system parameters that can be passed through the API, so I sometimes need to check the documentation separately. I would also like to have easier CSV/XLSX export for billing and usage statistics directly from the interface. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I like best about Apify is how easy it makes web scraping and data collection at scale. The platform provides many ready-to-use actors, reliable cloud execution, and scheduling capabilities, which significantly reduce the time and effort required to build and maintain scraping workflows. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The main drawback is the learning curve for new users who are not familiar with web scraping concepts. Some actors could also benefit from more detailed documentation and examples to make setup and customization easier. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

This is an incredible way to get various types of structured data. I use it to get information about leads, do social media research, general scraping, and a lot more. Cheap and super convenient.

It has a very simple and straightforward interface and I can easily integrate it with platforms like make.com or Claude Code. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The actors in the store vary in quality. Some are better than others, and when it comes to general scraping, you need a bit of know-how to get the best results. It also takes some time to learn how to configure everything properly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Everything lives in one place, you pay only when it's called, and you don't have to build a single scraper.

That's the part I think is genuinely underrated about Apify - it's not just a hosting platform, it's a scraping utility layer you can lean on. For someone building a AI agentic business for other businesses that's a significant shortcut. The UI is not super complicated to use, the API integration is easy to find and implement, their hosting servers have plenty power to handle huge data outputs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The pricing model is confusing - compute units, platform fees, Actor rental fees all layered on top of each other, hard to predict costs before you run something. Free tier is quite limited, you hit the ceiling fast when experimenting. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We use Apify extensively across our organization for web scraping, data extraction, and automation workflows. Before adopting Apify, gathering large-scale data from the web was a constant bottleneck — we relied on fragile, homemade scripts that broke constantly and required significant developer time to maintain. Apify completely transformed that process. We now run dozens of automated actors on a schedule, pulling structured data from e-commerce sites, news sources, and competitor platforms with zero manual intervention. The platform solved critical business problems around market intelligence, lead generation, and content aggregation. Our data team can now focus on analysis rather than collection, and the reliability of our pipelines has increased dramatically. The scope spans across marketing, product, and business development teams, all benefiting from clean, timely data delivered by Apify every single day. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

there's nothing I didn't like about the product, everything approved Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I like best about Apify is how quickly it enables reliable data collection and automation at scale. The platform removes much of the complexity traditionally associated with web scraping by providing ready-to-use Actors, managed infrastructure, scheduling, proxy management, APIs, and integrations in a single ecosystem.

It allows me to focus on the data and business objectives rather than maintaining scraping infrastructure. I particularly appreciate the flexibility to start with pre-built solutions and then customize workflows as requirements become more advanced. The combination of ease of use, scalability, and seamless integration with AI and automation tools makes Apify a highly productive platform for both technical and non-technical users. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

While my overall experience with Apify has been very positive, there are a few areas that could be improved. For more complex projects, the learning curve can become steep, particularly when working with advanced Actor configurations, APIs, webhooks, and large-scale automation workflows. Some aspects of debugging failed runs could also be more user-friendly, especially when dealing with dynamic websites or anti-bot protections.

In addition, as projects scale up, it can sometimes be challenging to estimate resource usage and costs in advance. More detailed cost forecasting and monitoring tools would help users better predict expenses and optimize large deployments. These are relatively minor issues, but addressing them would make an already strong platform even better. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Apify is really good for my project. I used it to get data from websites and it work very well. It was easy to use and I didn’t need to know much coding to start.

The price is very affordable and I can do a lot without paying too much. The actors are simple and help me automate things fast. I like that I can run tasks and get the data I need without trouble.

Overall Apify is great for school projects or small business work. It saves me time and its not hard to learn. I recommend it if you want something easy and cheap that still works good. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

some actors badly moderated and useless, but still charge money Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's the fastest to use — you get $5 free and can start scraping in exactly 5 seconds. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Costs are hard to predict — compute units are abstract, and a run that returns more than expected costs more than expected. Marketplace actor quality varies; when a platform changes, some break and you wait on the author. Steeper learning curve than it needs to be for non-developers. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It hit the sweet spot between the no-code simplicity of Octoparse and the full control of custom scripts. It handles the hard parts (headless browsers, proxies, anti-bot) out of the box, outputs clean structured data that plugs straight into my existing stack, and lets me schedule reliable recurring runs without managing infrastructure. For my specific need — automated scraping of dynamic review and competitor data feeding a weekly reporting pipeline — it was the most balanced fit. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Cost predictability. The compute-unit pricing can creep up if scraping volume isn't actively monitored, which makes budgeting harder for a small team. Secondary to that is the fragility of community-maintained Actors — when a platform changes its page structure, third-party Actors break and I'm left waiting on a fix or debugging someone else's code. The learning curve around core concepts (Actors, datasets, key-value stores) is also steeper than ideal for non-developers. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The Actor ecosystem and deployment pipeline are best-in-class. I can go from an idea to a production-ready web scraper or automation tool in under an hour, publish it to the Apify Store, and have it running immediately on managed infrastructure with built-in proxy rotation, scheduling, and storage.

The platform takes care of the painful parts of scraping at scale proxy management, browser orchestration, rate limiting, and retry logic so I can stay focused on the actual extraction logic. The pay-per-result pricing model for Store actors is a genuine differentiator: it lets me monetize the tools I build while giving users a low-friction way to try them.

The API and SDK are well-documented and consistent, and the recently added MCP server support makes it trivial to plug scrapers into AI agent workflows. I run 80+ actors and MCPs on the platform, and reliability has been solid. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The build system can be frustrating — when a deployment fails, the error messages are often vague and don't point you

to the actual problem. Debugging a failed Docker build on the platform sometimes means pushing multiple

trial-and-error commits just to get a useful stack trace. The Store discovery algorithm is also opaque; it's hard to

understand why some actors rank well and others with better SEO and more users don't. Pricing transparency for

platform compute could be improved — estimating costs for a new actor before running it at scale requires a lot of

guesswork. The web IDE is underpowered compared to local development, and the dashboard UI can feel sluggish when

managing a large portfolio of actors. Minor gripe: the documentation sometimes lags behind SDK changes, so you

occasionally find examples that use deprecated patterns. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.