The Apify web scraping, data extraction, and automation platform

What do you like best about the product?

What sets Apify apart is how much it puts in one place. The actor marketplace means you're rarely starting from scratch — whether you need LinkedIn contacts, Google Maps data, or social media insights, there's almost always a ready-built solution waiting. It's easy to use, competitively priced, and reliable enough to make it a core part of our lead generation stack. For a small team, that combination is hard to beat.

What do you dislike about the product?

The main frustration is inconsistent actor quality. Since anyone can publish an actor, the standard varies quite a bit

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

Apify solves one of the biggest bottlenecks for a small growth team — getting quality data at scale without hiring dedicated resources or building fragile in-house scrapers. Before Apify, pulling lead lists, researching competitors, and enriching contact data was slow, manual, and expensive. Now it's fast, automated, and affordable. The result has been a 50–100% growth in our lead pipeline, 2–5 hours saved per week, and a cost saving of $500–$1,000 per month compared to alternative solutions. It has essentially levelled the playing field for us against much larger competitors.

What do you like best about the product?

I’ve been building scrapers on Apify as a solo developer for about a year now, and what keeps me here is the infrastructure I don’t have to think about. Proxies, retries, dataset storage, and scheduling are all handled. I run daily scrapes against fintech sites, app stores, and regulator pages for a competitive intelligence product I’m building, and Apify’s universal actors cover most of what I need without me having to write custom code.

What do you dislike about the product?

For now, nothing. I am very satisfied with the services and also the prompt attention gotten from the support team

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

I personally have actors I created on the platform, and I also use the platform to perform web scraping and lead extraction at scale.

What do you like best about the product?

Social media scraping works great and fast

What do you dislike about the product?

News scraping does not work well, It is better to use your own script

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

Scraping

What do you like best about the product?

What I like most about Apify is that it makes web data collection scalable and repeatable without forcing us to build everything from scratch. The ready-made actors are especially useful for use cases such as Google Search monitoring, LinkedIn research, lead generation, and competitor tracking.

The biggest benefit for us is the time savings. Rather than manually collecting and organizing data, we can automate the process, schedule recurring runs, and export results in formats like CSV, Excel, JSON, or Google Sheets. The API access is also a major plus, since it lets us connect scraped data to our internal workflows and reporting tools.

Overall, Apify stands out because it brings flexibility, automation, and usability together in one platform. It helps our team get more consistent data, move through research cycles faster, and scale data collection without adding extra manual effort.

What do you dislike about the product?

What I dislike about Apify is that some workflows can still feel quite technical, especially for non-engineering users. Setting up certain actors, configuring inputs properly, choosing the right proxy settings, and understanding usage limits often takes some trial and error.

Another downside is that scraper reliability can vary depending on the target website. With sources like Google Search or LinkedIn, changes in page structure, access rules, or rate limits can lead to failed runs or incomplete results. That’s understandable with web scraping, but it still means you need to monitor runs and do occasional troubleshooting.

The cost structure can also be hard to predict before running larger jobs. More upfront cost previews, clearer error messages, and more guided setup steps would make the platform easier to use and reduce uncertainty, especially for business users.

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

Apify helps us solve the challenge of manually collecting and organizing web data from sources like Google Search and LinkedIn. Before using it, these tasks took a lot of repetitive research, copying, cleaning, and formatting. With Apify, much of that work is automated, and we get structured data that’s easier to analyze and put to use.

The biggest business benefit for us is improved efficiency. Our team can gather search results, company information, job postings, prospect data, and competitor insights far faster than we could manually. This directly supports lead generation, market research, recruiting intelligence, and competitor monitoring.

It also lets us scale our research without adding extra headcount. By scheduling recurring runs and exporting data into tools like CSV, Excel, JSON, or Google Sheets, we can keep information current and make decisions more quickly. Overall, Apify saves time, improves data consistency, and helps our team spend more time on analysis and outreach instead of manual data collection.

What do you like best about the product?

Apify makes it incredibly easy to scale our web scraping operations. Their built-in proxy rotation is highly reliable and handles IP bans flawlessly. It has saved our team countless hours that we would have otherwise spent managing custom scraping infrastructure, allowing us to focus on extracting and analyzing the data rather than dealing with request blocks.

What do you dislike about the product?

The learning curve can be a bit steep for absolute beginners. While the pre-built Actors are extremely helpful for standard use cases, building a custom scraper from scratch requires a solid understanding of Node.js or Python, which might be a bit challenging if you don't have a technical background.

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

We use Apify to automate our market research and competitor price tracking. Before Apify, we struggled with building robust scrapers that would break frequently due to website structure changes or IP blocks. Apify's reliable platform, scheduling features, and proxy management resolved these issues, reducing our scraper maintenance time by 80% and allowing us to gather clean, structured data on a daily schedule.