Apify
Apify / apify.com
Cloud platform for web scraping and browser automation providing pre-built actors and a marketplace of crawlers that AI developers use to collect training data, power RAG pipelines, and automate web-based workflows.
Pricing
$49/mo
Free plan
Yes
Category
Developer Tools
Platforms
4
Free plan
Yes
API access
Yes
Open source
No
Platforms
4
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What is Apify?
Apify is a web scraping and browser automation platform widely used in the AI builder community for collecting training data, populating RAG pipelines with web content, and automating web-based AI workflows. The platform's actor marketplace — a library of pre-built web scrapers and automation tools — provides crawlers for almost any major website without writing custom scraping code.
Apify Actors are serverless cloud functions that run web scraping and automation tasks. The actor marketplace includes scrapers for LinkedIn, Google Maps, Amazon, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and hundreds of other sources — providing immediate data collection from specific platforms without building custom scrapers. Actors can be run on demand, scheduled, or triggered by webhooks.
For RAG pipeline data collection, Apify's Website Content Crawler extracts clean text from any website for immediate use as LLM context, similar to Firecrawl but with more configuration options for complex sites with authentication, pagination, or dynamic content.
Apify Proxy provides residential and datacenter IP rotation for scraping sites with bot detection, enabling data collection from sites that block standard server IPs. This proxy infrastructure is a significant differentiator from simpler scraping APIs.
The Apify API allows triggering, scheduling, and retrieving results from any actor programmatically, integrating web data collection into AI application workflows. LangChain integration makes Apify a native data source option for RAG applications.
At $49/month for Starter, Apify is accessible for AI developers who need web data at scale beyond what free tiers provide.
How Apify works
Apify runs as ai search software built around text and data workflows. Users typically start with a prompt, upload, or connected data source, and the underlying model handles the heavy lifting before returning a result you can refine or export. It's available on web, python, and javascript, with API access for teams that want to embed it into their own products.
Watch Apify in action
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What makes it worth shortlisting
The capabilities that matter most for teams evaluating Apify.
Actor marketplace
1,500+ pre-built web scrapers for specific platforms (LinkedIn, Amazon, Google Maps, YouTube) providing immediate data collection without custom scraping code development.
Website Content Crawler
Extracts clean text from any website for direct use as LLM context in RAG pipelines, handling JavaScript rendering, pagination, and dynamic content.
Proxy rotation
Residential and datacenter IP rotation enabling data collection from sites with bot detection, a significant differentiator from simpler scraping APIs that fail on protected sites.
Best use cases
Who should use it
Pros
- Actor marketplace provides immediate scrapers for 1,500+ specific platforms without custom code
- LangChain native integration makes Apify a first-class RAG data collection source
- Proxy rotation enables data collection from sites with bot detection
- Website Content Crawler provides clean text for immediate RAG use without additional parsing
Cons
- Scraping legality varies by target site — review terms of service and applicable laws before scraping
- $49/month Starter is significant for casual use — evaluate free tier credit sufficiency
- Actor marketplace quality varies — test specific actors for your target site before production use
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Is it worth the price?
Free plan with $5 platform credits/month. Starter $49/month. Scale $499/month. Enterprise custom.
Model
Freemium
Starting price
$49/mo
Free trial
No
Tools like Apify
Firecrawl (rank 418) provides simpler URL-to-Markdown extraction. Bright Data provides enterprise web scraping infrastructure. Oxylabs provides proxy and scraping infrastructure. Jina Reader (rank 419) provides free single-URL extraction.
Apify vs Firecrawl
A side-by-side look at the closest alternative in this category.
Apify
Apify
Firecrawl
Firecrawl (Mendable)
Free plan with $5 platform credits/month. Starter $49/month. Scale $499/month. Enterprise custom.
Free plan (500 pages/month). Hobby $16/month (3,000 pages). Standard $83/month (100,000 pages). Open source self-hosted available.
Review Apify's data handling policy. Scraped web content and proxy traffic processed on Apify's infrastructure.
Review Firecrawl's data handling policy. URLs and extracted content processed on Firecrawl's infrastructure. Self-hosted open source deployment keeps data private.
Review Apify's privacy policy and terms. Web scraping legality varies — review terms of service of target sites and applicable laws. GDPR considerations for EU personal data collection through scraping.
Review Firecrawl's privacy policy. Web pages submitted for crawling are processed on Firecrawl's servers for cloud plans. Open source self-hosted option keeps data within customer infrastructure.
- Actor marketplace provides immediate scrapers for 1,500+ specific platforms without custom code
- LangChain native integration makes Apify a first-class RAG data collection source
- Proxy rotation enables data collection from sites with bot detection
- Website Content Crawler provides clean text for immediate RAG use without additional parsing
- Open source with free tier makes AI web data infrastructure accessible without significant cost
- JavaScript rendering handles dynamic web pages that simple HTML parsers fail on
- Crawl mode automates multi-page site ingestion — documentation sites, blogs, knowledge bases — without manual URL discovery
- LLM Extract provides AI-powered structured data extraction without manual parsing rules
- Scraping legality varies by target site — review terms of service and applicable laws before scraping
- $49/month Starter is significant for casual use — evaluate free tier credit sufficiency
- Actor marketplace quality varies — test specific actors for your target site before production use
- Free plan 500 pages/month is consumed quickly for substantial crawling projects
- Some websites block automated crawling — not all targets can be reliably scraped
- Legal and terms-of-service review required before scraping third-party websites at scale
Technical & deployment info
Key facts about model providers, platforms, and team support.
Model Provider
Apify
Platforms
Web, Python, JavaScript, API
Deployment
SaaS, Cloud
Integrations
LangChain, LlamaIndex, Make.com, Zapier, API
Team Collaboration
No
Launch Year
2023
Security & privacy
Compliance signals and data-handling notes as reported by the vendor.
Review Apify's data handling policy. Scraped web content and proxy traffic processed on Apify's infrastructure.
Review Apify's privacy policy and terms. Web scraping legality varies — review terms of service of target sites and applicable laws. GDPR considerations for EU personal data collection through scraping.
What users are saying
Verified reviews from signed-in users, stored in the backend and averaged into this tool's rating.
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Common questions about Apify
Editorial Verdict
Should you use Apify?
Apify is the best web scraping platform for AI developers needing automated data collection for RAG pipelines and AI training, with the marketplace providing immediate scrapers for specific platforms.
Last verified July 24, 2026.