--- title: "Apify Reviews, Pros and Cons - 2026 Software Advice" description: "Reviews of Apify. Learn how real users rate this software's ease-of-use, functionality, overall quality and customer support. Talk to our advisors to see if Apify is a good fit for you!" source_url: "https://www.softwareadvice.com/data-extraction/apify-profile/reviews/" page_type: "reviews" language: "en" --- 1 million+ businesses helped. Get advice Get Free Advice [Home](https://www.softwareadvice.com/) / [Data Extraction Software](https://www.softwareadvice.com/data-extraction/) / [Apify](https://www.softwareadvice.com/data-extraction/apify-profile/) / Apify Reviews Software Advice offers objective insights based on verified user reviews and independent product and market research. When our advisors match you to a software provider, we may earn a referral fee. [Overview](https://www.softwareadvice.com/data-extraction/apify-profile/) Reviews [Alternatives](https://www.softwareadvice.com/data-extraction/apify-profile/alternatives/) # Apify User Reviews ## Reviews summary - Overall rating: 4.8/5 - Total reviews: 579 ### Secondary ratings - Ease of use: 4.7/5 - Customer support: 4.6/5 - Value for money: 4.6/5 - Functionality: 4.8/5 ### Rating distribution - 5 stars: 497 reviews (86%) - 4 stars: 76 reviews (13%) - 3 stars: 5 reviews (1%) - 2 stars: 0 reviews (0%) - 1 star: 1 reviews (0%) ### Most mentioned pros - It’s a reliable platform that makes large‑scale data collection and automation much easier than managing custom scripts or infrastructure. Once workflows are set up, they run consistently in the background and save a significant amount of manual effort. - Apify solved a real gap for me at Pin Wei — capturing external customer sentiment and competitor data that my internal iPOS pipeline couldn't see — and feeding it into one weekly reporting view in Looker Studio. - What I like most is the sheer breadth of the Store; having access to pre-built Actors for Google Maps, Instagram, and LinkedIn saves me dozens of hours of custom development. ### Most mentioned cons - Some prebuilt Actors break silently when target websites update their layout, and the error logs during failed runs are too technical and vague to debug quickly without deep platform knowledge. - Before adopting it, we relied heavily on static and often outdated data sources, which made our targeting less effective and increased manual effort for the team. - The automated system repeatedly rejected valid documents and did not provide enough information about why they were being rejected, making troubleshooting difficult. ## Apify customer reviews Showing reviews 1-25 of 579 (page 1). ### Great for selling scrapers, blind spot on customer runs - Overall rating: 4/5 - Reviewer: Ivan S. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Information Technology and Services - Company size: Self-Employed - Product usage: Used daily for less than 6 months - Reviewed: August 2026 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered I publish eleven scrapers in the Apify Store and sell them from there. The platform covers residential proxies, a real browser inside the container, scheduling and metered billing, so I never rented a server or wrote payment code. What it does not cover is visibility into what happens on the customer side. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Functionality: 4/5 #### Pros Proxies belong to the platform, and I pin or rotate the exit IP per session instead of buying them separately. Build tags let me push a beta version and compare it against the live one before customers ever reach it. Billing counts dataset items for me, so a run that finds nothing costs the customer nothing. #### Cons I cannot open the logs of runs my customers start, only aggregate counts, so their failures are hard to reproduce. The daily automated test marks healthy Actors as under maintenance when the default input is heavy. Revenue figures live in the web console alone, with no API to pull them. --- ### Exceptional Data Ingestion and Lead Generation Engine with Outstanding ROI - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Real Estate - Company size: 51-200 employees - Product usage: Used weekly for free trial - Reviewed: August 2026 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered Our overall experience with Apify has been transformative. It turned a previously painful, maintenance-heavy web scraping workflow into a reliable, automated data pipeline. The Value for Money is outstanding when compared to the cost of hiring dedicated data scraping engineers and managing private proxy clusters. It has directly boosted our lead discovery speed, improved our market valuation models, and freed our team to focus on core business strategy rather than fixing broken crawlers. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Value for money: 4/5 - Customer support: 3/5 - Functionality: 4/5 #### Pros The User Interface is remarkably intuitive, making it straightforward to navigate datasets, inspect runs in real time, and schedule automated crawls. The Actors ecosystem is by far the biggest highlight; being able to deploy pre-configured scrapers for complex portals like Idealista without writing infrastructure code accelerated our Lead Generation efforts dramatically, allowing us to capture high-value property listings and investor contacts in record time. On the infrastructure side, Security is enterprise-grade, offering secure API key management, encrypted storage, and anonymous residential proxy rotation that protects our internal network footprint. Whenever we encountered edge-case technical questions, the Customer Support team was exceptionally fast, knowledgeable, and proactive in helping us optimize our configurations. #### Cons Platform-level Bugs and Issues are extremely rare, as Apify’s cloud infrastructure is rock-solid. However, when target websites abruptly change their frontend layout, third-party community Actors can occasionally experience unexpected parsing errors until the maintainer updates the code. In terms of Value for Money, the pricing model is very fair, but you need to actively monitor residential proxy data consumption and compute units on heavy crawls to avoid burning through your monthly allocation faster than projected. --- ### Definitely works and it's worthy - Overall rating: 3/5 - Reviewer: Arthur P. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Retail - Company size: 11-50 employees - Product usage: Used daily for less than 12 months - Reviewed: June 2021 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered Generally, I was super well-assisted and the system worked 99% of the time, I have experienced only one outage with the SERP Proxy service in more than 12 months using. Considering the difficulty of scraping google I understand that this is very acceptable. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 4/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 3/5 #### Pros The proxy feature works very good and the dashboard allows me to watch exactly how I'm spending my money. The marketplace is also very interesting although I haven't used it. #### Cons The proxy service doesn't allow me to choose the country for the requests, so the websites that have IP-related restricted access doesn't work with the Apify service. --- ### A practical platform for collecting public web data for research - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Faustino G. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Education Management - Company size: 11-50 employees - Product usage: Used monthly for less than 12 months - Reviewed: July 2026 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered My overall experience has been very positive. I use Apify as part of my research workflow to collect publicly available data from multiple online sources. It has significantly reduced the time I spend preparing datasets and allows me to focus more on data analysis and interpretation. I especially appreciate the flexibility of the platform and the ability to integrate the collected data with other analytical tools that I use regularly in my research. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros I mainly use Apify for academic research on socio-environmental issues and digital public debates. What I like most is the large collection of Actors available for different websites and social media platforms. Instead of developing a scraper for every project, I can usually find an existing Actor, configure it, and obtain structured datasets in a relatively short time. Another advantage is that the exported data integrate well with the rest of my workflow, including Python for data processing, Gephi for network analysis, QGIS for spatial analysis, and ATLAS.ti for qualitative analysis. #### Cons Some Actors have excellent documentation, while others require more experimentation before obtaining the expected results. As the platform continues to grow, I think it would be helpful to have more standardized documentation and better indicators showing which Actors are actively maintained. It also takes some time to understand the pricing model when you are a new user. #### Reasons for switching to Apify I switched because Apify makes data collection much easier for many websites and social media platforms. Instead of creating or maintaining a scraper for every project, I can often use an existing Actor and obtain structured datasets much faster. This allows me to spend more time analyzing the data instead of building extraction tools. --- ### Apify is such a time saver - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Dorcas M. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Computer Software - Company size: Self-Employed - Product usage: Used weekly for less than 12 months - Reviewed: August 2026 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered Really great, would recommend. It saved me a lot of time I would have spent writing and maintaining my own scrapers, and the actors mostly just work the first time. The pricing is the only thing that made me think twice, but I'd still use it again. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 4/5 - Customer support: 3/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros How easy to use it is, you just see how an actor works, then plug it in, its very easy to use. You don't have to build a scraper from scratch or figure out the technical side, someone has usually already made an actor for what you need and it just runs. #### Cons Cost, the starter plan starts quite high. If you're only running a few tasks now and then it feels like a lot to pay before you've even seen the value, and the credits go faster than you expect once you start running bigger jobs. --- ### Best tool to extract info in real time from social networks - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Cristian B. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Marketing and Advertising - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: Used daily for less than 12 months - Reviewed: July 2026 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 4/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros What I like most is how easy it is to automate repetitive web data collection. The large library of Actors, reliable infrastructure, and straightforward API make it simple to build workflows without spending time managing scraping infrastructure. It saves time and scales well. #### Cons The learning curve can be a bit steep when working with more advanced workflows, especially for new users. However, the documentation and community resources make it much easier to get up to speed. --- ### Apify, MCP, and LLM together are a real game changer. - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Gustavo Z. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Design - Company size: Self-Employed - Product usage: Used daily for free trial - Reviewed: September 2026 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered It took me some time to get used to, but I always found it very confusing. Eventually, I switched to other services like BrightData. However, with MCP + Antigravity, everything became easier and more powerful. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros It just works. The range of actors, speed and quality of outputs is impressive. MCP makes everything easier and more practical, from testing to deployment. #### Cons At first, the dashboard can feel a bit confusing, there are so many options and actors that it's hard to know which one to choose. --- ### Seamless scraping that plugs right into my workflow - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Gerald V. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Religious Institutions - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: Used daily for less than 6 months - Reviewed: September 2026 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered Very efficient and thorough with its scraping abilities. Apify handles complex extraction tasks reliably, and paired with Claude for processing the data afterward, it's become a core part of my workflow. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Value for money: 4/5 - Customer support: 4/5 - Functionality: 4/5 #### Pros Integrating Apify with Claude has been seamless — scraped data flows straight into my workflow without any extra reformatting, so I can run tasks in parallel and get to results much faster. It's streamlined how I work overall, cutting out a lot of steps I used to handle manually. #### Cons The user interface could be a bit more intuitive — a few workflows take longer to navigate than they should, and some streamlining there would go a long way. --- ### MCP in Cursor actually runs my Actors - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Viktor K. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Computer Software - Company size: Self-Employed - Product usage: Used monthly for less than 12 months - Reviewed: August 2026 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros The Store plus cloud runtime in one place. I can ship a packaged Actor with inputs, datasets, proxies, and billing, list it publicly, and price it pay-per-event instead of building my own SaaS. The other piece I use daily is MCP: I pin my Actors in Cursor, and the agent can start real runs and read bounded output instead of inventing scrape code. Local Playwright/Crawlee development still maps cleanly to apify push, so what I test locally is what buyers run in the cloud. That combination — distribution, rerunnable cloud jobs, and agent-callable tools — is what I could not get from a script on my laptop or from n8n/Make alone. #### Cons Debugging cloud runs that work locally but return empty datasets. Logs, proxy settings, the request queue, and dataset preview live in different Console screens, so a failed run still means a lot of tab-hopping before you know whether it was proxy, timeout, or extraction. MCP setup does not travel well across tools. I repeat OAuth and server config in Cursor, Claude, and Codex. Narrow Actor pins help, but it feels like setup tax every time I switch IDE. --- ### Great API service - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Alexander S. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Marketing and Advertising - Company size: 11-50 employees - Product usage: Used daily for less than 6 months - Reviewed: July 2026 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered Still great, we use it on daily basis to automate research with our AI agents. It was easy to integrate via API #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 4/5 - Customer support: 4/5 - Functionality: 4/5 #### Pros Big choice of API services - but we mostly use scaping of social media, monitoring competitors ads and google maps scraping #### Cons Monthly subscription - I would prefer to use pay as you go model even if pricing was slightly higher #### Reasons for choosing Apify More choice of api services, chepaer pricing --- ### Apify saved us tons of time. - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Saif R. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Computer Software - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: Used daily for less than 2 years - Reviewed: February 2026 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered We plugged Apify into our backend to pull Google Maps reviews for businesses on our platform. Took maybe a day to get the API integration working, which was faster than I expected. The sync runs on a cron job now and we don't really think about it anymore, it just works. We did have to try a couple different actors before finding one that returned clean data consistently, but once we landed on the right one it's been solid. For a two-person team building a SaaS, not having to build and maintain our own scraping infrastructure saved us weeks of work we couldn't afford to spend. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 4/5 #### Pros The API is dead simple. You send a request, you get structured JSON back. No need to manage proxies, headless browsers, or parsing logic. We picked up a Google Maps reviews actor from their store and had it running in our backend within hours. Data quality is consistent and the response includes everything in one shot: review text, ratings, reviewer profiles, owner responses, place metadata. #### Cons Some of the actors in the store aren't great. I tried a couple that had bad documentation or just returned weird data, so it took me a few tries to find the one that actually worked for our use case. Also wish there was a way to estimate how much a run will cost before you actually run it, because I've had a couple surprise bills when I was still tweaking the settings. #### Reasons for switching to Apify calculated pros and cons, found apify to be cheap, does what I want, and easy to use. --- ### Apify Gold Standard for Web Scraping - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Moussa A. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Information Services - Company size: Self-Employed - Product usage: Used daily for less than 6 months - Reviewed: March 2026 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered "My overall experience with Apify has been excellent. It has become our primary tool for data extraction and workflow automation. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros The most impressive aspect of Apify is its seamless scalability and the vast library of ready-made actors. #### Cons The learning curve can be a bit steep for non-technical users, especially when customizing complex scrapers. #### Reasons for switching to Apify I needed a more scalable, cloud-based solution with better API support. Apify's library of ready-made actors --- ### Incredible ROI and automation for both B2B and NGOs - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Roman M. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Non-Profit Organization Management - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: Used daily for less than 2 years - Reviewed: May 2026 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered The value for money is fantastic, especially considering you don't need to pay for external proxy providers or AWS servers to run your code. Also, their customer support is top-tier; they are actually human, responsive, and incredibly supportive of non-profit initiatives. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 4/5 #### Pros Apify abstracted away all the headaches of web scraping for me. I use it heavily for USE.NGO to aggregate European job postings. The user interface is intuitive, making it easy to configure runs, monitor usage, and set up webhooks. What really stands out is their approach to data management and security. I can confidently run authenticated scrapers knowing the environment is secure, and the data comes out in perfectly clean JSON or CSV formats ready for our database. As a Demand Gen professional, I also use it to scrape B2B data for lead generation campaigns. The productivity improvement is night and day—you set it, forget it, and let the data flow. #### Cons You have to keep an eye on your compute usage. If you write or configure an inefficient scraper, it can chew through your credits faster than expected. #### Reasons for switching to Apify Pricing, ease of use, customer suppoer and overall more "human" approach --- ### Excellent Platform for Scalable Web Scraping and Automation - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Randeep D. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Computer Software - Company size: 11-50 employees - Product usage: Used weekly for less than 12 months - Reviewed: June 2026 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered My overall experience with Apify has been very positive. The platform is reliable, easy to scale, and has significantly reduced the time spent on manual data collection. Its automation features and ready-to-use tools make it a valuable solution for web scraping, lead generation, and market research projects. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros Easy to set up and use Reliable web scraping and automation capabilities Large library of ready-to-use actors Strong API integration options Scales well for large data collection projects #### Cons Costs can be difficult to predict for large-scale usage Some advanced features have a learning curve Debugging scraping issues could be more user-friendly Documentation for certain use cases could be more detailed #### Reasons for switching to Apify We switched to Apify because we needed a more scalable and automation-focused solution. Compared to our previous system, Apify provides better API access, greater flexibility for custom workflows, and more reliable handling of large-scale data collection tasks. --- ### Reliable, flexible and genuinely time-saving - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Wojciech K. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Oil & Energy - Company size: 501-1000 employees - Product usage: Used daily for less than 2 years - Reviewed: June 2026 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered Apify replaced hours of manual research with fully automated pipelines that just run in the background. From monitoring job boards and discussion groups to generating leads for clients – it handles everything reliably and consistently. What started as a personal productivity tool has become a core part of how I deliver value to clients. The free credits make it easy to test before committing, and once you see the first results, the decision to stick with it is obvious. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros The reliability and flexibility in one platform. Ready-made actors get you started in minutes, custom builds handle edge cases, and everything runs on schedule without any maintenance. Output is always clean and structured – straight into my workflow, no cleanup needed. #### Cons The learning curve for custom actors can be steep for less technical users. A more visual builder or better guided onboarding for that step would make the platform significantly more accessible. --- ### Great Platform for Building and Managing Automation Workflows - Overall rating: 4/5 - Reviewer: Pranay J. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Computer Software - Company size: 51-200 employees - Product usage: Used weekly for less than 6 months - Reviewed: May 2026 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered Overall, my experience with Apify has been positive. I started using it while participating in the Apify $1M Challenge and used it to build and publish automation Actors. The platform helped me collect information, automate repetitive tasks, and experiment with automation workflows without managing my own infrastructure. The user interface was easy to navigate after the initial learning phase, and the platform offered good value by combining deployment, monitoring, storage, and scheduling capabilities in one service. Customer support was responsive when I experienced verification issues, and the team stayed engaged until the matter was resolved. While there are areas that could be improved, particularly around onboarding and verification, I found the platform reliable, useful, and well suited for developers working on automation and data collection projects. Although lead generation was not my primary use case, I can see how the data collection and automation capabilities could support lead generation workflows for businesses. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 4/5 #### Pros What I liked most about Apify was the combination of flexibility and ease of use. The user interface made it simple to deploy Actors, monitor runs, and review logs without needing multiple tools. The platform also provides good value for money by handling hosting, scheduling, storage, and execution in one place. I primarily used it for automation and information collection projects, and it significantly reduced the amount of time required to manage infrastructure. I also found the platform reliable for my use cases, with very few operational issues during normal usage. #### Cons The biggest issue I encountered was with the identity verification and payout process. The automated system repeatedly rejected valid documents and did not provide enough information about why they were being rejected, making troubleshooting difficult. There is also a learning curve for new users, particularly when first understanding concepts such as Actors, datasets, and deployments. While customer support was helpful, I believe the onboarding experience and verification workflow could be improved to reduce confusion and potential issues. --- ### Best scraping infra we've used. Period - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Eris T. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Computer Software - Company size: Self-Employed - Product usage: Used daily for less than 6 months - Reviewed: May 2026 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered Apify has been one of the highest-leverage tools in our stack. We came in needing a scraping layer for our agent pipeline and didn't want to spend weeks building proxies, schedulers, and storage from scratch. Within a day, we had pre-built actors pulling structured listings off freelance boards into a clean dataset, wired into our pipeline via the REST API. Eight months in, it's still the layer doing the heaviest lifting — quietly, reliably, and for a fraction of what a dedicated scraping engineer or self-hosted stack would cost. The platform is mature in the ways that matter: schedules, run history, dataset storage, and observability all come out of the box. The API is clean enough that wiring it into a Claude-based agent took an afternoon, not a sprint. The Actor Store covers most common targets, and when something isn't there, the SDK and CLI make custom actors realistic. The friction points are real but bounded — plan caps bite on spiky workloads, Actor Store quality is inconsistent, and the local dev loop could be tighter. None of those have been dealbreakers, and the tradeoffs are honest for what you get. For a small team building scraping into a product rather than running one-off pulls, Apify is the right foundation. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros Apify's strongest card is how fast it gets you from "we need scraping" to scraping running in production. The pre-built Actor Store covers most common targets out of the box — we had Scout pulling structured listings off freelance boards within an hour of signing up. Beyond that, it's a proper infrastructure platform, not just a scraper: schedules, datasets, key-value stores, proxies, and a clean REST API all sit behind the same account, so wiring it into an agent pipeline is straightforward. The compute-unit pricing scales predictably for mixed workloads, and the observability — run history, dataset views, logs per run — means you can debug a broken scrape without rebuilding your own monitoring stack. For a small team, it does the work of an entire scraping engineer. #### Cons The plan caps are punishing for spiky workloads. Once you hit the monthly compute limit, everything stops dead — no soft overage, no pay-as-you-go top-up that doesn't push you up a whole tier. Actor Store quality is also wildly inconsistent: pre-built actors are a strength when they work, but there's no clear signal of which ones are actively maintained vs abandoned, and we've had selectors silently break mid-pipeline. The local dev story is the third weak spot — iterating on actor inputs or debugging a failing run usually means pushing up and waiting for a cloud run, instead of a clean "run this locally with the same environment as cloud" mode. None of these are dealbreakers, but they're the friction points worth knowing about going in. --- ### Essential scraping layer that makes a small-team data product viable - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Jakub P. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Music - Company size: Self-Employed - Product usage: Used weekly for less than 6 months - Reviewed: April 2026 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered We run akce.tech, a Czech dance music event aggregator pulling from 16+ sources. Apify powers roughly half of those — the hardest half: Facebook, Instagram, Resident Advisor, and automated source discovery via Google Search. Everything runs in a single daily cron batch feeding into Claude for AI extraction, then MariaDB and Elasticsearch. Without Apify, this project would either not exist or be a full-time job maintaining fragile scrapers. Productivity impact is enormous — we're a small team and Apify lets us focus on what's differentiated (AI extraction, search UX) instead of fighting UI changes from Meta every week. Value for money is excellent at our scale; user interface and Console visibility are solid for debugging and monitoring runs. Minor friction around actor discovery and schema consistency, but these are growing-pains issues, not fundamental flaws #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Value for money: 4/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros - Managed scrapers for hostile targets — Facebook Events, Instagram Posts, and Website Content Crawler (for Cloudflare-protected sites like Resident Advisor) absorb maintenance we'd never manage ourselves. - Pay-per-use pricing — fair and predictable for a small-team daily-batch workload; no idle cost. - Ready-made actor store — new data sources go from idea to running pipeline in hours. - Clean API and SDK — scheduled runs, dataset exports, and webhook integration all "just work." - Solid output quality — structured JSON drops straight into our Claude extraction pipeline without glue code. #### Cons - Actor discovery is noisy — multiple overlapping actors per platform with weak trust signals (official vs. community, last-updated, production readiness). - Output schemas vary between similar actors — switching an actor means rewriting normalization code. - Cost predictability for long crawls — a dry-run cost estimator would help budgeting. - Partial-failure transparency — when an actor returns fewer items than expected, it's not always clear whether the source had fewer results or something silently broke. --- ### A critical platform for scaling data operations and custom APIs - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: André M. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Arts and Crafts - Company size: 11-50 employees - Product usage: Used daily for free trial - Reviewed: April 2026 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered My overall experience has been outstanding. Apify plays a central role in making my operation happen efficiently and at scale. It reduced manual work dramatically, improved the reliability of our data pipelines, and gave us the flexibility to build custom services and APIs directly on top of the platform. The combination of automation, infrastructure, scheduling, monitoring, and custom deployment capabilities makes it much more than just a scraping tool—it’s become an operational backbone for our business. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros The biggest advantage of Apify is how easy it makes it to build, automate, scale, and deploy data workflows in production. It has become a critical part of my operation because it allows me to automate large-scale data collection, lead generation, monitoring, and internal integrations with exceptional reliability. What stands out the most is the flexibility of the platform. Beyond using existing actors, I can host my own APIs and custom services directly on Apify, which makes it much easier to centralize business logic and keep my entire stack running in one scalable environment. The infrastructure is highly reliable, security feels solid, deployments are simple, and the UI makes managing tasks, runs, schedules, and logs very straightforward. For the amount of engineering time it saves, the value for money is excellent. #### Cons Honestly, there is very little to dislike. If I had to point out one area for improvement, it would be making some advanced configuration and debugging workflows slightly more intuitive for new users. While the platform is extremely powerful, beginners may need a short learning curve to fully unlock its potential. That said, once the workflows are in place, the stability and scalability more than make up for it. --- ### Powerful and Scalable Web Scraping Platform for Automation - Overall rating: 4/5 - Reviewer: Bhargav P. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Information Technology and Services - Company size: 51-200 employees - Product usage: Used daily for less than 2 years - Reviewed: June 2026 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered Overall, I’ve had a very positive experience with Apify. It has helped automate repetitive web data collection tasks, especially for competitor ad monitoring and market research, saving hours of manual work while providing reliable, scheduled data. It’s an excellent platform for developers and teams building production-grade scraping workflows. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Value for money: 3/5 - Customer support: 3/5 - Functionality: 4/5 #### Pros Apify makes large-scale web scraping simple with its cloud execution, scheduling, proxy management, and extensive Actor ecosystem. It’s highly scalable, reliable, and has significantly reduced the time spent on competitor research and data collection. #### Cons The learning curve is steep for beginners, and debugging failed Actors can be time-consuming. The Actor Store could also benefit from better discovery, quality ratings, and comparison features. --- ### What to expect from Apify - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Carlo A. F. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Information Technology and Services - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: Used daily for less than 2 years - Reviewed: December 2025 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered Its been a great way to research and use the best APIs out there. You can compare them and see their documentation, samples, interact with it, etc. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros A marketplace with lots of options or actors, they are rated, documented and can be interacted with in an interface so that you can decide which ones to chose. Apify is essential to my business for the automations I provide to my clients at Fernanz.com #### Cons Some of the prices of a few of the actors, not Apify's fault. Not much I can think of that I dont like --- ### The pre-built scraper marketplace is worth it on its own - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Marcin M. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Marketing and Advertising - Company size: Self-Employed - Product usage: Used daily for less than 6 months - Reviewed: September 2026 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered Positive. I use it for B2B lead research - resolving company names to domains via the Google Maps Actor, and pulling homepage content for qualification - all through the API from my own scripts. It reliably does the part I don't want to own: maintaining scrapers and fighting anti-bot systems. No reliability problems, the docs answered most of my questions, and the cost has been negligible for my volume. It's a fixed part of my workflow now and I'd set it up the same way again. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros The Actor marketplace is the main draw - for most common data sources (Google Maps, search results, e-commerce, generic website content) a maintained scraper already exists, so I'm not writing or babysitting my own. Actors handle proxies, rate limiting, and anti-bot measures behind the scenes. Results come back as clean structured data you pull via API. The API and docs were good enough that I wired Apify into my existing Node pipeline in an afternoon, and it runs unattended. Pay-as-you-go pricing meant my last project cost a few dollars rather than a subscription commitment. #### Cons Pricing is hard to predict before you run something. Different Actors use different billing models - per result, per compute unit, per event - and the free monthly credit has caps that only become obvious once you hit them. Community-published Actors vary in quality and upkeep, so you have to check reviews and last-updated dates. And the data is only as good as its source: scraping Google Maps, a meaningful share of results were the wrong business and I had to add my own validation step downstream. Not really Apify's fault, but worth knowing going in. --- ### Powerful platform for building and selling scrapers at scale - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Verified Reviewer - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Information Services - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: Used weekly for less than 12 months - Reviewed: March 2026 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered Overall, my experience with Apify has been very positive. We use it to build, deploy, manage, and sell scrapers, so it directly supports both our technical workflow and business goals. It helps with reliable information collection, reduces manual work, and makes it easier to launch scraper products faster. From a value-for-money perspective, it has been worthwhile because it saves time and helps create revenue-generating tools. I have not needed much customer support, but the platform itself has been strong enough that I would still rate the overall experience highly. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 4/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros What I like most about Apify is that it makes scraper deployment and management much more practical. It is strong for information collection, structured inputs and outputs, scheduling, and turning scrapers into products you can actually offer to users. The interface is solid overall, and once you know your way around it, it feels ahead of the curve for this kind of platform. It also offers good value for money if you are using it seriously for building and commercializing scrapers. #### Cons What I like least is that there is still a learning curve, especially when packaging scrapers cleanly for the platform and handling debugging when something breaks. Some bugs or runtime issues can take time to trace, and the platform can feel a bit technical for newer users. I would also like even clearer cost visibility and simpler troubleshooting in some areas. --- ### An Essential Data Engine for Trend Mapping and Competitive Intelligence - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Paul W. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Human Resources - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: Used daily for less than 6 months - Reviewed: May 2026 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered My overall experience has been excellent. Apify has fundamentally transformed how I approach content optimization and product positioning. Instead of manually trying to keep up with shifting market dynamics, I use Apify to automate the collection of competitive intelligence. This data allows me to map out competitor moves and pivot my content strategy to align perfectly with current market demand. It’s an indispensable, robust tool for anyone running a data-driven digital workflow. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 4/5 - Customer support: 4/5 - Functionality: 4/5 #### Pros The sheer reliability and depth of its social media scraping capabilities. Being able to extract clean, structured trending data from complex platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and X seamlessly is a game-changer. It takes the guesswork out of market research by showing me exactly what my competitors are doing and what products or trends people are actively buying into right now. #### Cons The initial learning curve can be a bit steep if you aren't deeply technical. Navigating the UI and fine-tuning actor configurations/advanced settings takes some trial and error before you get a seamless, automated workflow running. --- ### Rock solid scrapers with a generally Great developer experience. - Overall rating: 5/5 - Reviewer: Simranjeet S. - Verified reviewer: Yes - Industry: Marketing and Advertising - Company size: 2-10 employees - Product usage: Used daily for less than 12 months - Reviewed: July 2026 - Review source details: This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered Apify is my default tool for any scraping or web data task as an agency; we lean on it for Instagram content research and it's never let us down. #### Ratings breakdown - Ease of use: 5/5 - Value for money: 5/5 - Customer support: 5/5 - Functionality: 5/5 #### Pros Excellent pre-built actors — the Instagram scraper delivers complete, structured data (posts, images, metadata) reliably. The CLI and API are first-class, making automation genuinely easy rather than an afterthought. Fast to get started, transparent run logs. #### Cons Free-tier actor coverage is limited for some platforms; you'll want a paid plan for heavier or broader use. ## More reviews [Next reviews](https://www.softwareadvice.com/data-extraction/apify-profile/reviews/?page=2) --- Apify Reviews, Pros and Cons - 2026 Software Advice