The Apify web scraping, data extraction, and automation platform

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?

This has literally saved me so much time that it’s spared me from having to hire a VA. I couldn’t be happier!

What do you dislike about the product?

The price feels very expensive, and I’d really like to see cheaper options.

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

It saves me time and money when I’m scanning Google Maps for prospects.

What do you like best about the product?

A very stable API marketplace platform, with a good customer support

What do you dislike about the product?

Nothing in particular, they provide exactly what I expected

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

Scraping from social platforms efficient data collection

What do you like best about the product?

What I like best about Apify is how easy it makes web scraping and data collection at scale. The platform provides many ready-to-use actors, reliable cloud execution, and scheduling capabilities, which significantly reduce the time and effort required to build and maintain scraping workflows.

What do you dislike about the product?

The main drawback is the learning curve for new users who are not familiar with web scraping concepts. Some actors could also benefit from more detailed documentation and examples to make setup and customization easier.

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

Apify helps automate the collection of data from multiple websites, reducing the amount of manual research and repetitive work required. This saves time, improves data consistency, and allows me to focus more on analysis and development rather than gathering information.

What do you like best about the product?

The Actor Store is what gets me every time. I remember when I first needed Instagram data for an AI agent I was building, I was ready to spend weeks coding a scraper from scratch, dealing with proxies, anti-bot systems, the whole headache. Then I found Apify, searched the Store, found exactly what I needed, configured it in maybe 20 minutes, and the data was flowing into my n8n pipeline.
That's the thing that really stuck with me. As a solo developer running multiple projects at the same time, I can't afford to waste time reinventing the wheel. Apify basically handed me enterprise-level scraping infrastructure without asking me to become an infrastructure engineer first. The reliability is also something I genuinely appreciate, once an Actor is running on a schedule, it just works. Clean output, consistent delivery, no surprises. That kind of dependability is rare and it's what keeps me coming back.

What do you dislike about the product?

The pricing model is honestly the biggest friction point. There are two layers, platform credits and per-Actor costs on top of that, and when you're just starting out it's not immediately obvious how fast things can add up. I had a couple of runs that burned through credits faster than expected because I didn't fully understand how a specific Actor charged per result. A clearer cost estimator before you hit run would save a lot of headaches.
The UI also has room to grow. It's functional, but debugging a failed run takes more clicks than it should. When something breaks mid-pipeline, I want to know exactly what went wrong without having to dig through logs manually. Better inline error reporting would make a real difference for developers running Apify in production environments.

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

The core problem was data. My AI sales agent needed real Instagram data to function, and without a reliable way to collect it, the whole system just didn't work. I was either scraping manually, which doesn't scale at all, or looking at building my own scraper from scratch, which would've taken weeks and still probably broken every time Instagram updated something.
Apify solved that completely. Now the data flows automatically into my n8n pipeline, lands clean in Supabase, and my AI agents pick it up from there to qualify leads and trigger WhatsApp outreach sequences. The whole thing runs on its own.
In practical terms: what used to be a bottleneck that blocked the entire system is now something I don't think about anymore. I went from spending time fighting infrastructure to spending time improving the actual intelligence layer, the prompts, the logic, the client results. That shift alone is worth a lot when you're a solo developer trying to build something serious with limited time and resources.