Apify: web scraping, data extraction, and automation tools for AI

What do you like best about the product?

"What I like best about Apify is how easy it makes web scraping without needing to build everything from scratch. I use the Google Scraper actor as part of my n8n automation workflow, and it integrates smoothly — I just call the actor and get clean, structured data back that I can use directly in my automation. Setup was quick, and I didn't have to maintain any scraping infrastructure myself. The reliability and consistency of the results have made it a core part of my workflow. It's saved me a lot of development time and effort."

What do you dislike about the product?

"The only downside I've experienced is that the documentation could be a bit more beginner-friendly, especially for someone integrating Apify actors into external automation tools like n8n. It took me some trial and error initially to get the setup exactly right. Pricing for higher usage volumes could also be a consideration for smaller projects. That said, once everything is set up, it runs smoothly and reliably."

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Before using Apify, I struggled with building and maintaining my own web scraping scripts — handling proxies, rate limits, and anti-bot measures took a lot of time and constant maintenance. Now, I use Apify's Google Scraper actor as part of my n8n automation workflow, which handles the entire scraping layer reliably. This has resulted in significant time savings on development and maintenance, more consistent and structured data output, and a much more scalable automation workflow overall. What used to take hours of scripting and debugging now runs automatically and reliably in the background.

What do you like best about the product?

The store is the whole thing for me. I'm in sales, not engineering, and I had a working scraper running in about twenty minutes without touching code — searched Google Maps, picked the actor with the most runs, typed in a location and hit start. First usable CSV came out before I'd finished my coffee.

The part I didn't expect to care about is that it just handles blocked requests, retries and pagination on its own. I ran one job that pulled a few thousand records over an afternoon and never had to check on it. Output columns are consistent every run, so my contact sheet doesn't need cleaning up each time, and our developer wired the API into it in an afternoon so results land automatically now.

What do you dislike about the product?

Pricing is the main one. It's usage based and I still can't tell what a run will cost before I start it — same actor, same search, different week, and the compute units come out way off. There's no estimate on the input screen and no warning while it's running. I got a couple of bills I wasn't expecting before I worked out to set memory and timeout limits on everything.

The other thing is that store actors go stale. Two I was relying on broke when the target site changed its layout. One got patched within a week, the other still comes back empty instead of throwing an error, which took me a while to even notice. You can see run counts and star ratings before you pick one, but not when it was last updated or whether it's currently working.

Docs are also written for developers. Plenty of Node examples, not much for someone who just wants to configure an existing actor.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Prospect list building. I run corporate catering sales for a restaurant group, and finding the offices and hotels worth calling in our delivery area used to mean hours of copying from Google Maps by hand. It was painful enough that I'd put it off or only get halfway through, so a lot of the accounts in our catchment were never actually reached.

Now that's an afternoon instead of a project, and I'm working off a much bigger contact base than I'd have built manually. Early days still, but it's running at around two new corporate bookings a month off lists that started in Apify — small numbers, but those are bookings we wouldn't have had otherwise.

What do you like best about the product?

The thing I like best is that it removed the worst part of web scraping for me — the maintenance. I used to run my own scripts for price tracking, and every couple of weeks a site would change its markup and my whole pipeline would quietly die. With Apify I set the jobs on a schedule and they just run; when something does fail, it tells me, and I can see exactly what happened instead of discovering a week later that my data's been empty.

The actor marketplace is a close second. For a lot of the sources I need — e-commerce sites, registries, social platforms — someone has already built and maintained a scraper, so I spend my time on the actual project instead of reverse-engineering a website.

And more recently the MCP server has become a favourite: I can point an AI agent at Apify and it pulls live web data as a tool call. That's the kind of feature that makes you wonder why nobody else did it first

What do you dislike about the product?

Pricing is the main thing. It's usage-based, which I actually like in principle, but it's hard to estimate what a run will cost before you start it — prices vary by actor and there's a compute component on top. I once left a misconfigured job running and watched my credit balance drop faster than I expected; I learned my lesson and set limits, but it would be much better if the platform told you 'this run will cost about X' upfront instead of making you find out after.

The marketplace can be uneven too. Anyone can publish an actor, and while that's great for variety, it means some popular actors are poorly maintained. I've had an actor break after its maintainer pushed an update and only found out when my pipeline started failing. A clearer signal about how recently an actor was updated would save a lot of users a lot of headaches.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Two problems, mainly.

First, reliability. I run data collection for price monitoring and small research projects, and before Apify that meant maintaining my own scrapers — which broke constantly. Every site redesign was a small crisis, and I'd find out a pipeline was dead only when I needed the data. Apify solved that by handling scheduling, retries, and monitoring for me. Now the jobs run themselves, and when something fails I know about it immediately instead of a week later.

Second, speed. A lot of the sources I need are already covered by actors in the marketplace, so I skip the whole build-and-maintain cycle for common scraping tasks. That's let me take on projects I wouldn't have started before — the setup cost was just too high. The API also means I can plug collected data straight into my own small apps, and the MCP server does the same for AI agents, which has been a nice shortcut.

The benefit in one line: I get dependable, current data without spending my evenings keeping scrapers alive.

What do you like best about the product?

I used many enriching Actors at once to help my company streamline their recruiting and sales process. Although the Actors are very rigorously built and highly integrable to our system, sometimes it breaks down but I have no idea why... But overall, it works 90% of the time and I can highly recommend Apify.

What do you dislike about the product?

Sometimes it breaks down but I have no idea why...

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I used many enriching Actors at once to help my company streamline their recruiting and sales process.

What do you like best about the product?

Apify Store & Pre-built Actors: The marketplace of pre-built Actors (scrapers for social media, search engines, e-commerce, etc.) saves a huge amount of setup time. You can start collecting structured data right away with zero coding required.

Developer Ecosystem (Crawlee & Apify SDK): When I need custom scrapers, the open-source Crawlee library and Apify SDK offer strong support for Playwright, Puppeteer, and Cheerio, along with built-in proxy rotation, fingerprint generation, and queue management.

Serverless Infrastructure: Being able to run scrapers in the cloud without managing VM instances, IP rotations, or Docker containers really streamlines the overall data pipeline.

Integrations & Webhooks: Native webhooks, automated scheduling, and straightforward integrations with platforms like Zapier, Make, and cloud databases (PostgreSQL, BigQuery, AWS S3) make downstream workflows feel effortless.

What do you dislike about the product?

Pricing Complexity (Compute Units): At first, it can be hard to estimate Compute Unit (CU) consumption for long-running scrapers or complex, dynamic browser-based scraping. Setting firm usage limits is essential to prevent unexpected overages.

Learning Curve for Advanced Customization: Pre-built Actors are largely plug-and-play, but once you move into multi-step dynamic workflows or more complex headless-browser bypasses, the setup becomes more demanding. In my experience, it helps to have strong JavaScript/Node.js or Python knowledge to configure everything correctly.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Apify completely solves the operational burden of maintaining web scrapers, proxy pools, and headless browser infrastructure. It allows small teams and solo developers to collect large-scale, structured web data reliably without needing dedicated DevOps or data engineering staff.