1. Should you try Apify? Overview

What it is	Web scraping and automation platform (developers)
Country / HQ	Prague, Czech Republic
Best for	Prebuilt scrapers (Actors) plus managed proxy and compute
Check before buying	Sign up on the free plan and browse the Apify Store for an Actor that fits your target site.
Editor rating	4.8 / 5
Pricing signal	Free tier + paid from $39/mo

2. Features What it does

Feature	What it does
Actor marketplace	Thousands of ready-made scrapers and automations you can run or fork.
Managed infrastructure	Proxies, scheduling, storage and autoscaling handled for you.
Custom Actors	Build your own in JavaScript, Python, Playwright or Puppeteer.
Proxy network	Datacenter and residential proxies for hard-to-scrape sites.
API & MCP	Drive runs and pull data programmatically, including an MCP server for agents.

Plan	Price / mo	Key limits & who it fits
Free	$0 ($5 credits)	Oct 2026 Actor store access, basic scraping, community support
Starter	$39/mo ($39 credit)	Oct 2026 More compute, scheduled runs, email support, API access
Team / Scale	$199/mo ($199 credit)	Oct 2026 Team collaboration, higher limits, priority support
Business	$999/mo ($999 credit)	Oct 2026 Enterprise-scale scraping, custom Actors, SLA
Enterprise	Custom	Oct 2026 Custom SLAs, dedicated support, compliance

Access type	Details
Web	console plus REST API and an MCP server for agentic workflows.
SDKs	(Crawlee, Apify SDK) for Python and JavaScript.
Integrates	with Zapier, Make and data warehouses via export.

Source	Rating	What it says
G2	4.7/5 (~623)	High for a dev tool; loved for the Actor marketplace and support.
Capterra	4.8/5 (~578)	Praised for value and managed infra.
Editorial	Positive	Top pick for developers; main complaint is billing unpredictability.

✔ Suitable	✘ Not suitable
• Developers and data teams who want to start from a ready scraper and run it on managed infra.	• Non-technical users who need a no-code point-and-click scraper.

Competitor	How it differs	Best for
Bright Data	Bright Data is proxy-first with a big network and scraper APIs.	Choose Bright Data when proxy reach and unblock rate are the priority.
Oxylabs	Oxylabs is premium proxy and scraper API for enterprises.	Choose Oxylabs when you want account management and reliability over self-serve.
ScrapingBee	ScrapingBee is a simple API for rendering and scraping pages.	Choose ScrapingBee for lightweight, code-first scraping without a marketplace.
Octoparse	Octoparse is a no-code desktop scraper for non-developers.	Choose Octoparse when the operator is non-technical.
Firecrawl	Firecrawl turns sites into clean LLM-ready markdown via API.	Choose Firecrawl when the goal is AI-ready extraction, not raw data.
Diffbot	Diffbot uses AI to structure pages without selectors.	Choose Diffbot when you want selector-free extraction across many sites.
Browse AI	Browse AI is no-code monitoring and extraction for business users.	Choose Browse AI when ops or sales need scheduled extraction without code.

Takeaway	Apify is the developer-friendly default for web data because the Actor marketplace means you are rarely starting from zero – someone has usually already built the scraper you need. The flip side is that the credit model makes costs hard to predict, so the responsible move is to prototype on the free tier and model your compute and proxy burn before committing to a paid plan.
Who should pick it	Developers and data teams who want to start from a ready scraper and run it on managed infra.
Who should skip it	Non-technical users who need a no-code point-and-click scraper.