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Apify

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Also: Apify Store, Apify Actors, Apify platform, apify.com, Apify scraper, Apify API

Apify

Quick answer

Apify is a cloud platform for web scraping and browser automation where scrapers run as containerized "Actors", thousands of them ready-made in the Apify Store. The free plan gives a small monthly usage credit, paid plans bill compute units, proxies and storage, and many Store Actors add their own fee; to compare it with other options, see the best web scraping tools.

Apify is a cloud platform for web scraping and browser automation, founded in Prague in 2015, where scrapers run as containerized 'Actors' and thousands of ready-made Actors are available in the Apify Store; it also maintains the open-source Crawlee library.

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What people do with Apify

Key facts

Made byApify Technologies (founded 2015, Prague)
Core unitActors: containerized programs with JSON input
MarketplaceApify Store (thousands of public Actors)
Open-source libraryCrawlee (Apache 2.0, Node.js and Python)
Pricing modelFree plan, paid monthly plans with prepaid usage; billed by compute units, proxies and storage
AI integrationOfficial MCP server exposing Actors as tools

What is Apify?

Apify is a cloud platform for web scraping, data extraction and browser automation. Its central idea is the Actor: a packaged program (usually Node.js or Python, often running a headless browser) that takes JSON input, does a job such as scraping a website, and writes results to storage you can download or pull through an API. You can write your own Actors, or rent ready-made ones from the Apify Store, a marketplace with thousands of public scrapers for sites like Google Maps, Instagram, TikTok, Amazon and LinkedIn, many of them built and maintained by third-party developers.

Apify was founded in 2015 in Prague, Czech Republic, and is a commercial company. It also maintains Crawlee, an open-source web scraping and crawling library for Node.js and Python released under the Apache 2.0 license. Crawlee runs anywhere, but it is designed to deploy easily to Apify.

How Apify works

  • Actors. An Actor is a Docker container with an input schema. When you run it, Apify allocates memory and CPU, starts the container and bills for the resources used.
  • Storage. Results go to a *dataset* (a table of items you export as JSON, CSV or Excel), a *key-value store* (files, screenshots, state) or a *request queue* (the list of URLs still to crawl).
  • Scheduling and integrations. Runs can be started from the console, the API, a schedule, or a webhook, and results can be pushed to tools such as Google Sheets, Slack or Zapier when a run finishes.
  • Proxies. Apify sells datacenter and residential proxy access so Actors can rotate IP addresses, which matters for sites that rate-limit or block cloud IPs.
  • AI agents. Apify publishes an official Model Context Protocol server, which lets AI assistants and agents call Actors as tools.

    • Pricing model

    Apify has a free plan with a small monthly allowance of platform usage, paid monthly plans that include a prepaid usage amount, and enterprise contracts. Usage is measured largely in compute units (one compute unit is commonly described as 1 GB of memory running for one hour), plus proxy traffic and storage. Many Store Actors add their own charge on top, either a monthly rental or a price per result or per event, set by the developer. Exact plan prices and rates change, so check apify.com/pricing rather than relying on figures quoted elsewhere.

    What people use it for

  • Pulling structured data from big platforms (maps listings, social profiles, product catalogs, search results) without writing a scraper.
  • Running custom scrapers built with Crawlee, Playwright or Puppeteer in the cloud with scheduling and storage handled.
  • Feeding web data into AI pipelines, for example crawling a documentation site into text for retrieval.
  • Monitoring prices, listings or reviews on a schedule.

    • Common problems

  • Unpredictable cost. A run's cost depends on memory, duration, proxy traffic and the Actor's own fee. A badly configured crawl can use far more than expected; set maximum items and memory limits.
  • Store Actors break. A third-party Actor depends on a site's layout. When the site changes, the Actor fails until its maintainer updates it, and quality varies between developers.
  • Blocking. Big sites deploy anti-bot systems such as DataDome, HUMAN (PerimeterX) and Cloudflare. Actors rely on proxies and browser fingerprinting to cope, which raises cost and still fails sometimes.
  • Legal and terms-of-service questions. Scraping personal data or logged-in content carries legal risk regardless of the tool; see is web scraping legal.

    • How it relates to automation

    Apify is a developer-oriented scraping infrastructure: it is strongest when you know exactly which site and fields you want at volume, and either an Actor already exists or you are comfortable writing one. It is less suited to one-off, multi-step tasks that span several sites and apps, such as logging in somewhere, deciding what to do based on what is found and then updating a CRM. For a wider comparison of tools, see best web scraping tools.

    Apify and Autonoly

    The two overlap on scraping and differ in model. Apify gives you prebuilt scrapers, proxies and storage for high-volume extraction. Autonoly gives you an AI agent that works in a live cloud Chromium browser from a plain-language request, with data extraction steps, native integrations such as Google Sheets and Slack, and the option to convert the session into a scheduled workflow. Autonoly does not provide proxies or IP rotation, so for very large scrapes of heavily protected sites Apify's proxy pool is a genuine advantage.

    Why It Matters

    Apify is often the first stop for anyone who needs data from a big website without writing a scraper. Knowing how Actors, compute units and Store fees work lets you predict cost and judge when a prebuilt scraper is the right tool versus a custom or agent-based approach.

    How Autonoly Solves It

    Autonoly takes a different route: you describe the task to an AI agent that works in a live cloud Chromium browser, extracts the data and writes it to Google Sheets, Airtable, Notion or a database, and you can convert the session into a scheduled workflow. Autonoly does not offer proxies, so Apify suits very high-volume scraping of heavily protected sites better.

    Learn more

    Examples

    • A marketing team runs a Google Maps Actor from the Apify Store to collect local business listings for a city and exports the dataset as CSV

    • A developer builds a Crawlee crawler locally and deploys it to Apify as an Actor that runs nightly with residential proxies

    • An AI assistant connected to Apify's MCP server calls a web-crawling Actor to fetch documentation pages before answering a question

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Apify has a permanent free plan with a small monthly allowance of platform usage, which is enough for testing and light scraping. Heavier use needs a paid plan, and many Store Actors charge their own rental or per-result fee on top of platform usage. Check apify.com/pricing for current amounts.

    An Actor is a serverless program packaged as a Docker container with a defined input schema. You run it with JSON input, it does a job such as scraping a site, and its output lands in Apify storage. Actors can be private or published to the Apify Store for others to use.

    A compute unit is Apify's measure of resource usage, commonly described as 1 GB of memory used for one hour. A run with 2 GB of memory for 30 minutes uses about one compute unit. The price per compute unit depends on your plan.

    Crawlee is an open-source scraping and crawling library under the Apache 2.0 license that you can run anywhere. Apify is the commercial cloud platform that hosts and schedules scrapers, including ones built with Crawlee, and adds storage, proxies and the Actor marketplace.

    Usually because the target site changed its layout or tightened bot protection. Store Actors are maintained by their authors, so check the Actor's issues tab and recent runs. Blocking problems often need a different proxy group or lower request rate.

    Some Actors accept cookies or credentials as input, and custom Actors can log in with a headless browser. Scraping behind a login raises terms-of-service and legal questions, and accounts can be suspended, so review the site's rules first.

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    Where this concept shows up in practice.

    DefinitionWeb CrawlerA web crawler (also called a spider or bot) is a program that systematically browses the internet by following links from page to page, discovering and indexing web content at scale.DefinitionData ScrapingData scraping is the broad practice of programmatically extracting data from any digital source — websites, applications, databases, documents, or APIs. It encompasses web scraping, screen scraping, and other automated extraction techniques.DefinitionAI Web ScraperAn AI web scraper is an AI-powered data extraction tool that understands page structure, identifies relevant data, and extracts information from websites without requiring manual CSS selector configuration or custom scripting for each target site.DefinitionPlaywrightPlaywright is Microsoft's open-source browser automation framework that provides a single API to control Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit browsers. It supports headless and headed modes, auto-waiting, and network interception, making it a leading choice for testing and web scraping.DefinitionPuppeteerPuppeteer is Google's open-source Node.js library for controlling Chrome and Firefox. It drives Chrome over the Chrome DevTools Protocol and is widely used for scraping JavaScript-rendered pages, generating PDFs and screenshots, and end-to-end testing.DefinitionStructured DataStructured data is information organized in a predefined, predictable format — typically rows and columns in databases, spreadsheets, or tabular files like CSV and JSON. Each field has a defined type and position, making it easy to query, filter, and analyze programmatically.GuideWeb Scraping with Python: A Practical Guide for BeginnersLearn web scraping with Python from scratch. Covers Requests, BeautifulSoup, Scrapy, and Playwright for extracting data from static and dynamic websites with practical code examples and best practices.GuideThe 7 Best Web Scraping Tools Compared: Features, Pricing, and Use CasesA detailed comparison of the best web scraping tools available, including Autonoly, Apify, Octoparse, Browse AI, ScrapingBee, Bright Data, and Playwright. Covers features, pricing, ease of use, anti-detection capabilities, and which tool fits each use case.

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