The Apify web scraping, data extraction, and automation platform

What do you like best about the product?

Apify is its ease of use, reliable web scraping capabilities, and extensive library of ready-to-use actors. It allows us to automate data collection quickly and scale projects without spending time maintaining custom scraping infrastructure.

What do you dislike about the product?

The main drawback is that usage costs can become harder to predict as projects scale. New users may also need some time to learn the platform’s workflows and advanced features.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Apify solves the challenge of collecting and managing web data at scale. By automating data extraction and monitoring tasks, it saves us time, reduces manual work, and provides faster access to valuable business insights.

What do you like best about the product?

The documentation is well written and easy to understand, even for people whose mother tongue isn’t English.

What do you dislike about the product?

It’s an expensive product for Brazilians.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We needed to build scrapers for social media, and Apify’s scrapers helped us a lot throughout the process.

What do you like best about the product?

What I like most about Apify is how quickly it allows you to start collecting data from public websites. The platform offers a large library of ready to use actors, reliable cloud execution, and excellent scalability. It eliminates much of the complexity involved in building and maintaining custom scraping infrastructure, which saves a significant amount of development time.

What do you dislike about the product?

The pricing can become expensive as usage scales, especially for large scraping workloads. Some advanced use cases also require familiarity with web scraping concepts, and debugging failed runs can occasionally take time. However, these are relatively minor drawbacks compared to the value the platform provides.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

My overall experience with Apify has been very positive. It is a reliable platform that consistently gets the job done for scraping public websites and automating data collection workflows. The combination of ready made tools, cloud infrastructure, and flexible integrations makes it easy to deploy and scale scraping projects. It has saved me considerable development and maintenance effort compared to managing custom scrapers.

What do you like best about the product?

The combination of flexibility and reliability is what keeps me coming back. I can grab a ready-made actor from the marketplace and be collecting data within minutes, or build something fully custom when the use case demands it. Either way, the results are consistent and the output is clean and structured – ready to plug straight into my workflow without any cleanup. For someone running multiple automated pipelines across different sources, that kind of dependability is everything.

What do you dislike about the product?

The learning curve when building custom actors can be steep if you're not comfortable with JavaScript or Python. It's not a dealbreaker, but newer users without a technical background might need some time to get past the basics. Better visual tooling or more guided templates for custom builds would make the platform accessible to a much wider audience.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Before Apify, monitoring job boards, discussion groups, and lead sources was eating 2-3 hours of my day. Now it runs automatically in the background and I check structured results in minutes. That time saving alone is significant, but the bigger benefit is speed – being first to spot and respond to new opportunities directly translates to more business won. On top of that, delivering automated data pipelines has become a service I actively offer to clients, so Apify went from being a personal productivity tool to a billable part of my work.

What do you like best about the product?

It hit the sweet spot between the no-code simplicity of Octoparse and the full control of custom scripts. It handles the hard parts (headless browsers, proxies, anti-bot) out of the box, outputs clean structured data that plugs straight into my existing stack, and lets me schedule reliable recurring runs without managing infrastructure. For my specific need — automated scraping of dynamic review and competitor data feeding a weekly reporting pipeline — it was the most balanced fit.

What do you dislike about the product?

Cost predictability. The compute-unit pricing can creep up if scraping volume isn't actively monitored, which makes budgeting harder for a small team. Secondary to that is the fragility of community-maintained Actors — when a platform changes its page structure, third-party Actors break and I'm left waiting on a fix or debugging someone else's code. The learning curve around core concepts (Actors, datasets, key-value stores) is also steeper than ideal for non-developers.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

My experience with Apify has been shaped by my role at Pin Wei, where I'm the sole data analyst building and maintaining everything from data pipelines to reporting dashboards. Apify came in to fill a specific gap: my internal stack (Make + Google Apps Script processing iPOS sales data) had no way to capture what was happening outside our own systems — customer reviews, competitor pricing, and our visibility on delivery platforms.
Getting started took some ramp-up. Coming from an Apps Script background, the core concepts — Actors, datasets, key-value stores — weren't intuitive at first, and I leaned on marketplace Actors rather than writing my own to move faster. Once I understood the model, the real value showed up in how cleanly it integrated: I wire Apify's output via webhook into Make, which lands structured review and competitor data into Google Sheets in the right schema for Looker Studio blending. That meant external web data and internal iPOS data finally sit in one weekly reporting view.
Day to day, the strongest part is reliability on hard targets. Google Maps and Foody are JavaScript-heavy and block scraping aggressively, and Apify's headless browsers and managed proxies handle that without me babysitting runs — important when I'm the only person maintaining the pipeline.
The friction has been cost predictability and Actor fragility. Compute-unit pricing means I keep an eye on volume to avoid creep, and when platforms change their layout, community Actors sometimes break and I wait on a fix. But at our scale the automation and integration benefits clearly outweigh those, and it's become a dependable part of how I turn scattered public data into something management can actually use.