Apify Reviews & Product Details

The ready-made actors just work. We use Google Maps, Google Search, website content, Facebook Ad Library, Google Ads and X/Twitter scrapers in our own products, and they return clean, structured data without us having to manage proxies or rebuild scrapers when sites change. The API is simple to call from our backend, and setting a spending limit on every run keeps our costs predictable. It has saved us months of development and maintenance work. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Pricing differs quite a lot between actors (pay-per-event, per result, compute units), so estimating the monthly cost takes some effort at first. Some pay-per-event actors also have a minimum charge limit, and if you set your run budget below it the API rejects the run with a 400 error. This wasn't obvious until we checked each actor's pricing details. The free plan is quite limited for some popular actors, so serious use really needs a paid plan. None of these are deal-breakers, though. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The ready-made scrapers (Actors) in the Store are really convenient. I can pick one, set it up in minutes, and pull public Instagram data straight into my own tools without writing any code. It saves me hours of manual searching every week, and I also like that it connects with Claude through the MCP server. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

With larger runs, the cost can add up quickly, so I always set a limit for each run upfront. It also took me a little time to figure out which Actor is the best fit for each task. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As a digital marketing agency owner, it helps with competitor research. SEO work that used to take hours now takes minutes, and linking to Apify via CLI has been a massive time saver. We get paid on performance, so research is an integral part of that, but burning hours doing grunt work is now a thing of the past. The pricing is clear, but could be a bit easier to understand. They have a great onboarding team, and tutorial videos on YouTube and webinars help fill in the knowledge gaps. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The interface is pretty busy. Thankfully, most of my interaction is via Claude through the CLI, so I don't have to endure the UI. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Pay-per-event monetization is the biggest win for us. We set a price per result, and Apify handles billing, payments and payouts, so we never had to build a payment system. We publish about 40 data tools on the Store and push updates from the CLI with one command. The API is fast and simple: our own backend calls our Actors (for example sanctions screening and media transcription) and gets results back in a few seconds. The Store also brings real users. A paying customer found our sanctions screening Actor there without any marketing from our side. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Some parts take time to learn. The monetization settings and Insights pages are not very intuitive at first, and account verification steps could be explained more clearly. As a developer I would like more detail when a user's run fails, so I can improve the Actor faster. The free monthly credit is also used up quickly when you maintain many Actors. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It plugs straight into n8n. I call the run-sync endpoint with one HTTP node and get the dataset back in the same step, so there’s no polling and no extra plumbing. I use the Instagram scraper and the Instagram profile scraper as the data layer for a daily lead radar I built for a gem dealer, and they’ve been reliable. The per-call spend cap (maxTotalChargeUsd) is the feature I value most, because a bad input can never run up a bill on a client build. Pay per result keeps it cheap: my first test read 30 profiles for about eight cents. The unexpected win was being able to export a run’s dataset and build the whole engine against that saved data, so weeks of development and testing cost nothing in scraping. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The free tier is tight once you’re building something real. Unnamed datasets are deleted after about a week, which nearly cost me my test data before I learned to export it straight away. A clear warning in the console when a dataset is about to expire would fix that. Some actors also carry their own run limits on top of your account’s limits, and the difference between the two isn’t obvious in the interface, so I lost time working out why a run was refused. Showing both limits side by side on the actor page would help. The step up to the paid plan is fair for what you get, but it comes sooner than expected once a workflow runs every day, so budget for it early. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Apify lets me run ready-made scrapers (Actors) without writing code. I connected it to Claude, so I describe what data I need in plain language and Claude runs the Actor and returns the results. Setup took minutes, and I did not need to learn a programming language or the platform’s console. Results come back as structured datasets that I can export to CSV for analysis. Pay-per-result pricing also makes costs easy to estimate before a run. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The free plan caps results at 10 items per run, so I could not collect a full dataset until I upgraded. The message after each run also pushes a paid plan, which is easy to miss. Actor quality varies: the Twitter/X scrapers differ a lot in price, reliability, and input options, and it takes time to compare them. Pricing per result is clear, but total cost is hard to predict before a large run. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Apify is really helpful if you’re unsure about what’s missing in your tech stack but still want a clear overview of the available tools that the best people in the market are using. It’s useful for data scraping and lead gen, and I definitely feel like I get my money’s worth. The pay-per-use option, or monthly subscriptions on individual actors, keeps things flexible for me, since I can choose a subscription when it makes sense and accept overages if I want to. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I don’t like that it requires a monthly subscription, and that if you have payouts, they only come once a week. Other than that the support can sometimes be slow but i've not had to contact them much tbh, the UI can be a bit cluttered but its managable, the integrations are present but limited. the performance is adequeate for my needs. the ai intelligence unforuntately is not currently useful Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I like most about Apify is how much time it saves me. I don’t have to build every scraping or automation workflow from scratch, I can start with an existing Actor, tweak it for my use case, and get things running pretty quickly. The flexibility is probably the biggest reason I keep coming back to it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The main thing I’d say is that there’s a bit of a learning curve when you first get started. With so many Actors, settings, and customization options, it can feel slightly overwhelming initially. Some of the more advanced workflows also take a little time to figure out. But once you get familiar with the platform, it becomes much easier to use. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I’m impressed by how fast it scrapes and how accurate the information it fetches is, with no hallucinations. It’s also easy to use alongside other applications like Google Sheets and Codex. In my view, the scraping charges are absolutely worth it, because if I had done the same work manually—or paid someone else to do it—it would have ended up being extremely expensive. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

After I started programming, I found it easier to use, but honestly it could be made simpler for everyone. There should be a step-by-step wizard that asks you questions and helps you build an actor without any coding. Alternatively, they could offer an agent who can understand the requirements and build an actor for you.

For people who don’t know what an actor is or what it does, I also think the term “actor” should be changed. They should use the word “scraper,” which is more familiar and easier to remember. When I used it for the first time, I didn’t know what an actor was, and I didn’t bother exploring it further. A simpler name, along with a simpler process for creating an actor, would make it much more approachable. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I'm a solo full-stack developer and I've used Apify for over a year to scrape Twitter/X accounts and posts, find leads on LinkedIn, and run my own Actor that scrapes Y Combinator jobs and companies. What I like most is that I can give one Apify API key to my coding agent (Claude Code) and it finds the right Actors in the Store and runs them for me. There's an Actor for almost anything, so I rarely build a scraper from scratch. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Pricing can get hefty, depending on which Actors you use. Most Actors are published by other people who set their own prices. For me, LinkedIn and Apollo scraping for lead generation, email validation and contact enrichment are usually the biggest costs. I understand that's not really Apify's fault, since they don't control what publishers charge. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.