Apify, Joute's review

The essentials

• Cloud scraping platform with ready-to-use actors marketplace
• Paid plan starting at $49/month, freemium available
• Supports JavaScript (Node.js), Python and community actors
• Targets developers and data teams who want reliable scraping in production

What is Apify?

Apify is a cloud web scraping and automation platform. What sets it apart: the actors marketplace. Thousands of prebuilt scrapers cover the main web sources — LinkedIn, Amazon, Instagram, Google Maps, etc. You can deploy an existing actor in minutes without coding, or deploy your own. Apify handles the cloud, scheduling, result storage and proxies. For data teams that need to regularly feed pipelines from the web, it's often the fastest setup to get running.

Strengths

Very rich actors marketplace

Thousands of pre-built actors for the most common sources. No need to code a LinkedIn scraper from scratch — there's probably one that already works.

Integrated cloud infrastructure

Storage, scheduling, proxies, monitoring — it's all in Apify. You focus on the logic, not the infrastructure.

Quality JavaScript and Python SDKs

Apify Crawlee (the JavaScript SDK) is one of the best scraping frameworks available. Python is also supported.

Limitations

Costs climb fast with volume

At high request or storage volumes, costs can become significant.

Community actors vary in quality

Some marketplace actors are outdated or poorly maintained. Check before relying on them in production.

Pricing

Freemium with $5/month in included credits. Starter plan at $49/month. Higher plans for large volumes. Check apify.com/pricing.

Alternatives

Apify = cloud scraping with marketplace. Alternative Scrapingbee (scrapingbee.com) = scraping API, $49/month. Alternative Bright Data (brightdata.com) = enterprise scraping. Alternative Firecrawl (firecrawl.dev) = markdown crawl for LLMs, $19/month.

Verdict

Apify is the best starting point for developers who want web scraping in production without building the entire infrastructure. The actors marketplace is a real time-saver.

FAQ

Does Apify work with Python?

Yes, Apify supports Python with the official SDK. The Python documentation is less extensive than JavaScript but functional.

Do Apify actors handle CAPTCHAs?

Some actors handle CAPTCHAs via integrated solving services. Check the specific actor's features.

How do you store scraped data?

Apify offers integrated datasets and key-value stores, or you can export to S3, Google Cloud Storage, etc.

Does Apify support residential proxies?

Yes, Apify Proxy includes residential, datacenter and Google SERP proxies. Billed separately.

Joute may earn a commission on subscriptions taken out via links in this article. This doesn't change our reviews.