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🎯 Apify at a glance
What the platform really does - and what's in it for you
| Feature | What it does | What you actually get |
|---|---|---|
| 🧩 Apify Store | A marketplace of ready-made scrapers ("Actors") for Google Maps, Instagram, TikTok, Amazon, LinkedIn and thousands more sites | You scrape a site in minutes without writing a single line of code |
| ☁️ Cloud runs | Every Actor runs on Apify's servers, with scheduling, retries and storage built in | No server to maintain, your laptop can stay closed |
| 🛡️ Proxies & anti-blocking | Datacenter and residential proxies, Google SERP proxy, unblocker | Fewer bans, fewer captchas, more complete data |
| 🔌 Integrations & API | REST API, webhooks, n8n, Make, Zapier, Google Sheets, Slack | The data lands where you work, automatically |
| 🤖 AI-ready | MCP server, LangChain and LLM integrations | Your AI agent can browse and scrape the web on demand |
| 💸 Price | Free plan with $5 of usage per month, paid plans from $19/month | You test for real before paying a cent |
💸 Free plan: $5 of platform usage every month, no credit card required - create your free account →
Looking for an Apify review written by someone who actually runs it in production, not a rewrite of the sales page? You're in the right place. I use Apify inside my own automations, mostly to pull leads and public data into n8n and Google Sheets, and in this review I'll show you exactly what it does well, what it costs in real life, and when you should pick something else.
Disclosure: this page contains affiliate links. If you sign up for a paid plan through them, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. My opinion stays my own. This site is independent and is not operated by Apify Technologies.
⭐ My Apify review in 30 seconds
No time to read everything? Here's the short version:
- My rating: 9/10. It's the most complete scraping platform I've used: you get ready-made scrapers, the infrastructure to run them, and the pipes to send the data anywhere.
- What I love: the Store saves you days of development, the free plan is real (no card), and the n8n / API integration is clean.
- What holds me back from a 10: the usage-based pricing takes a while to understand, costs can surprise you on heavy jobs, and some community Actors are better maintained than others.
- Price: free ($5 of usage/month), then Starter at $19/month, Scale at $199/month, Business at $999/month. Around 10% off with annual billing. Details in my pricing breakdown with my real bill.
My detailed score
| Criterion | Score |
|---|---|
| Range of ready-made scrapers | 10/10 |
| Reliability of runs | 9/10 |
| Integrations (n8n, API, AI) | 9.5/10 |
| Ease of use for non-developers | 8/10 |
| Price predictability | 7.5/10 |
This score is my editorial opinion based on my own use. It's not an average of customer reviews and not a promise of results on your projects.
🤔 What is Apify, exactly?
Apify is a cloud platform for web scraping and browser automation. It was founded in 2015 by Jan Čurn and Jakub Balada, went through Y Combinator, and is based in Prague. The company says it now serves more than 84,000 customers, from freelancers to companies like Microsoft, Samsung, Siemens and Decathlon.
The core idea is simple: instead of coding and hosting your own scraper, you run an Actor. An Actor is a small cloud program that does one job - "scrape Google Maps listings for this query", "extract all posts from this Instagram profile", "crawl this website and turn it into clean text for an AI". You fill in a form, click Start, and you get a clean dataset in JSON, CSV or Excel.
Those Actors live in the Apify Store. Some are built by Apify, most by independent developers who earn money when you use them. Apify says the Store now lists more than 75,000 of them, which means that for most popular sites, someone has already done the hard work.
And if you're a developer, Apify is also the company behind Crawlee, a popular open-source scraping library, so you can build your own Actor and deploy it on the same infrastructure.
⚙️ How Apify works: my real workflow
Here's how I actually use it, step by step, for a typical lead generation job.
Step 1: pick an Actor in the Store
I search the Store for what I need (for example "Instagram profile scraper" or "Google Maps scraper"). Each Actor page shows its rating, number of users, last update and pricing model. My rule: I pick an Actor that was updated recently, has lots of monthly users and a good rating. That alone avoids 90% of the bad surprises.
Step 2: fill in the input and run
Every Actor has a simple form: the URLs, keywords or profiles to scrape, the number of results, a few options. You don't write code. You click Start, and the run happens in the cloud. You can watch the log live, or just close the tab.
Step 3: get your data
Results land in a dataset you can preview as a table and export in one click (CSV, Excel, JSON, XML). Every run is kept for a while, so you can come back to it later.
Step 4: automate it (this is where it gets powerful)
This is what made me stay. You can schedule any Actor (every day, every Monday...) and trigger what happens next with webhooks or integrations. In my case, n8n starts the Apify run, waits for the dataset, cleans it with AI and pushes the qualified leads into Google Sheets. Once it's set up, I don't touch it.
Apify also connects natively to Make, Zapier, Google Sheets, Slack and more, and it offers an MCP server, so an AI assistant can call Actors directly to browse and extract data from the web.
🌐 What you can scrape with Apify (platform by platform)
This is the question I get most: "can Apify scrape this site?" For the big platforms, the answer is yes, and there's usually a well-maintained Actor ready to run. Here are the ones people use the most, with the price you'd pay on the Starter plan:
| Platform | What you get | Most-used Actor | Price on Starter | Users |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 📍 Google Maps | Businesses, phones, websites, ratings, emails (add-on) | Google Maps Scraper (compass) | $3.00 / 1,000 places | 625K |
| ⭐ Google reviews | Review text, rating, date, owner reply | Google Maps Reviews Scraper (compass) | $0.45 / 1,000 reviews | 59K |
| Posts, reels, profiles, hashtags, comments | Instagram Scraper (Apify) | $2.30 / 1,000 results | 410K | |
| 🎵 TikTok | Videos, profiles, hashtags, followers, comments | TikTok Scraper (clockworks) | $3.00 / 1,000 results | 296K |
| Public profiles, experience, education, email (option), no cookies | LinkedIn Profile Scraper (harvestapi) | $4.00 / 1,000 profiles ($10 with email search) | 75K | |
| 📢 Facebook Ads Library | Ads, advertisers, creatives, reach, dates | Facebook Ads Library Scraper (Apify) | $5.00 / 1,000 ads | 39K |
| 🔎 Google Search | Organic and paid results, People Also Ask, AI overviews | Google Search Results Scraper (Apify) | $2.50 / 1,000 results | 192K |
| ▶️ YouTube | Videos, channels, stats, transcripts (option) | YouTube Scraper (streamers) | $3.00 / 1,000 videos | - |
| 🐦 X / Twitter | Tweets, profiles, searches | Tweet Scraper V2 (apidojo) | $0.40 / 1,000 tweets | 101K |
| 🛒 Amazon | Products, prices, reviews | Amazon Reviews Scraper (junglee) | $5.00 / 1,000 reviews | 14K |
| 🌍 Any website | Clean text for AI, RAG and chatbots | Website Content Crawler (Apify) | Pay per usage ($0.20 per compute unit) | - |
Base prices without add-ons, from each Actor's official page on September 29, 2026. On the free plan, most of these cost 15 to 35% more (up to 80% more for Google Search); on Scale and Business, less.
Two things to keep in mind. First, several Actors often exist for the same platform, at very different prices: for Amazon reviews, one popular alternative charges under $1 per 1,000. Second, not all platforms are equal legally: public business data (Google Maps, ads libraries) is far less sensitive than personal profiles (LinkedIn, Instagram). More on that below.
I'm writing a dedicated guide for each of these platforms: which Actor to pick, what it really costs, its limits, and how I use it. Already live: Google Maps leads and Facebook Ads Library.
👥 Is Apify right for you? (by profile)
| Your situation | My take | Plan I'd suggest |
|---|---|---|
| Marketer or founder who needs leads (Google Maps, social profiles) | Perfect fit: ready-made Actors do 95% of the job | Free to test, then Starter |
| No-code / automation builder (n8n, Make, Zapier) | Excellent: it becomes the "data source" brick of your workflows | Starter |
| Developer or data team | Great: Crawlee + cloud hosting + proxies, without managing servers | Starter, then Scale |
| AI builder (RAG, agents) | Very good: website crawlers that output clean text + MCP server | Starter or Scale |
| Agency running jobs for clients | Relevant if you track costs per client | Scale |
| You need one small scrape, once, with zero learning | Probably overkill, a point-and-click tool may be simpler | Free plan only |
Not sure which plan? See my Starter vs Scale vs Business comparison.
💸 Apify pricing: what it really costs
Let's talk money, because this is the part most people get wrong. Apify doesn't charge "per scraper". Every plan gives you a monthly amount of prepaid usage, and your runs consume it.
| Free | Starter | Scale | Business | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly price | $0 | $19 | $199 | $999 |
| Usage included | $5 | $19 | $199 | $999 |
| Compute unit price | $0.20 | $0.20 | $0.16 | $0.13 |
| Max concurrent runs | 5 | 32 | 128 | 256 |
| Max RAM | 16 GB | 64 GB | 256 GB | 512 GB |
| Residential proxy | $8/GB | $8/GB | $7.50/GB | $7/GB |
| Support | Community | Chat | Priority chat | Account manager |
| Start free → | Choose Starter → | Choose Scale → | Choose Business → |
Annual billing saves about 10%. An Enterprise plan is available on quote. Prices checked on the official pricing page on September 29, 2026.
How usage is counted (the 3 things to understand)
- Compute units (CU): 1 CU = 1 GB of RAM used for 1 hour. A light scraper uses very little, a full browser crawling thousands of pages uses much more.
- Proxies: residential proxies are billed per GB, datacenter IPs per IP. Some plans include a batch of datacenter IPs.
- The Actor's own price: many Store Actors charge per result or per event (for example a fixed price per 1,000 results), some are rented monthly, others only cost the platform usage. It's always written on the Actor page, so check it before you run.
Watch out: unused prepaid usage does not roll over to the next month, and on paid plans, going beyond your included usage is billed as overage. On the free plan, runs simply stop until the next cycle, so you can't get a surprise bill there.
My advice to start
Start on the free plan (what $5 really buys). $5 is enough to run several real jobs and see what a typical run costs you. Set a usage limit in your billing settings, then move to Starter only when you run things on a schedule. Scale starts to make sense when you run a lot of jobs in parallel or when the lower compute and proxy prices save you more than the difference.
Official discounts (no code needed)
- Startups: 30% off the Scale plan (application required).
- Students and universities: 30% off Starter and Scale.
- Nonprofits: discounts on request.
All the official ways to pay less are in my Apify discount guide.
🔥 The best "deal" on Apify is the free plan itself: $5 of usage every month, forever, no credit card. Open your free account →
🔒 Is Apify safe and legal?
Apify has been around since 2015, is backed by Y Combinator and works with large enterprise customers, so the platform itself is serious. The real question is what you scrape.
My common-sense rules: stick to publicly available data, don't scrape behind a login you're not allowed to use, respect the site's terms, and be very careful with personal data. If you collect names, emails or profiles of people in the EU, GDPR applies to you, not to Apify. Apify provides the tool, you stay responsible for how you use it. When in doubt, ask a lawyer before launching a big project.
🗣️ What users say about Apify
Beyond my own experience, I went through public reviews to give you a balanced picture.
On Trustpilot, Apify shows a TrustScore of 4.8/5 on more than 750 reviews, and on G2 it's rated 4.7/5 on more than 570 reviews (checked September 2026). That's a strong, consistent signal.
What comes up again and again in positive reviews: the huge choice of ready-made scrapers, the time saved compared with maintaining your own scripts, the reliability of scheduled runs and the quality of integrations.
The main complaints: a real learning curve on advanced settings, a developer-oriented interface that can confuse beginners, and costs that are harder to predict on heavy jobs. Exactly what I noticed myself, and why I recommend starting small and setting a usage limit.
⚔️ Apify vs the alternatives
| Tool | Best for | Free tier | Paid from | Ready-made scrapers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apify | Everything, from no-code to large-scale | $5 usage/month | $19/month | ✅ Huge Store |
| Browse AI | Point-and-click scraping and site monitoring | 50 credits/month | ~$19/month (annual) | Some prebuilt robots |
| Bright Data | Proxies and datasets at enterprise scale | Trial credits | Pay as you go | Scraper APIs |
| Firecrawl | Turning websites into LLM-ready text | Limited free credits | ~$16/month | ❌ (API only) |
| ScraperAPI | Developers who just want an unblocking API | Limited free calls | $49/month | ❌ |
| Octoparse | Desktop visual scraping | Limited free tasks | ~$69/month (annual) | Templates |
Competitor prices are indicative, checked on public pages in September 2026. Always confirm on the vendor's site.
Apify vs Browse AI: Browse AI is easier on day one (you click on the elements you want). Apify wins as soon as you need volume, a site Browse AI can't handle, or real automation with an API.
Apify vs Bright Data: Bright Data is first a proxy and data giant, built for big budgets. Apify is more accessible and gives you the scrapers themselves, not just the network.
Apify vs Firecrawl / ScraperAPI: these are developer APIs that do one thing well. Apify can do the same (website content crawler, unblocker) plus thousands of site-specific scrapers.
⚖️ Pros and cons
What I like:
- A massive Store of ready-made scrapers: most popular sites are already covered.
- A real free plan, forever, with no credit card.
- Cloud runs, schedules, retries and storage included.
- Clean integrations: API, webhooks, n8n, Make, Zapier, Google Sheets, MCP.
- Proxies built in, no need for a second provider.
- Scales from a single test to industrial volumes on the same platform.
What can hold you back:
- Usage-based pricing that takes time to understand.
- Costs can climb fast on browser-heavy jobs or residential proxies.
- Community Actors vary in quality and maintenance.
- Interface still feels built for developers on advanced options.
- Unused monthly usage is lost.
🧪 My plan for your first 7 days
Day 1: create your free account, pick one Actor that matches your real need, run it with a small limit (50 to 100 results).
Day 2: look at the run cost in your console. Multiply by the volume you really need. You now know your real monthly budget.
Day 3 to 4: connect the output to where you work: Google Sheets, n8n, Make or Zapier.
Day 5: set a schedule and a usage limit in billing.
Day 6 to 7: decide. If the free $5 covers you, stay free. If not, Starter is the logical next step.
💡 My tip: always test an Actor on a small batch before a big run. It costs cents and saves you from paying for a large run with the wrong settings.
❓ Apify FAQ
Is Apify free?
Yes. The free plan gives you $5 of platform usage every month, forever, without a credit card. When it's used up, runs stop until the next month.
How much does Apify cost?
Starter is $19/month, Scale $199/month and Business $999/month, each including the same amount in prepaid usage. Annual billing saves about 10%.
Do I need to know how to code?
No, not for Store Actors: you fill in a form and click Start. Coding helps only if you want to build your own Actors.
What is an Apify Actor?
A cloud program that performs one task, like scraping a specific website. You can use thousands of them from the Apify Store or build your own.
Does Apify work with n8n, Make or Zapier?
Yes, it integrates with all three, plus Google Sheets, Slack, webhooks and a full REST API.
Is web scraping with Apify legal?
Scraping public data is generally allowed, but it depends on the data, the site's terms and privacy laws like GDPR. You are responsible for what you collect.
Is there an Apify coupon code?
Apify doesn't publish general coupon codes. The real savings are the free plan, about 10% off annual billing, and the official startup and student discounts.
Is this the official Apify website?
No. This is an independent review site. Apify and the brands mentioned belong to their respective owners.
🏁 My final verdict on Apify
My Apify review comes down to one idea: it's the platform that removes the painful part of web scraping. You don't maintain scripts that break every week, you don't manage servers or proxies, and for most sites you don't even write code.
It's not perfect: the pricing needs a bit of attention and some community scrapers are better than others. But with a free plan that lets you test on real jobs, and integrations that turn a one-off scrape into an automated pipeline, I think the risk is close to zero and the upside is huge. 👇
My Apify guides: Is Apify free? · Apify pricing (real bill) · Starter vs Scale vs Business · Apify discount · Google Maps leads cost · Facebook Ads Library scraper
This Apify review reflects my personal experience with the platform. It contains affiliate links: if you sign up through them, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. It doesn't change my opinion. This site is independent and not operated by Apify Technologies. Results depend on your use case and are never guaranteed.
Sources
- Apify - official pricing: https://apify.com/pricing
- Apify - about the company: https://apify.com/about
- Trustpilot - Apify reviews: https://www.trustpilot.com/review/apify.com
- G2 - Apify vs Browse AI: https://www.g2.com/compare/apify-vs-browse-ai
- Browse AI - pricing: https://www.browse.ai/pricing