Apify Review 2026
Apify is worth it if you want web data (Google Maps listings, product pages, job posts, public social profiles) without running your own servers, proxies and headless browsers. The free plan gives you $5 of usage every month, no credit card needed. Starter, the first paid plan, is $19 a month ($17 billed yearly). It's a weaker fit if you need a fixed, predictable bill: what you pay depends on memory, proxies and the price each scraper sets on its own.
We compared Apify with Bright Data, Browse AI and Firecrawl across five criteria, went through Apify's official pricing page and docs, and read hundreds of user reviews. Here's what most reviews skip: current prices (plenty of articles still quote $39 or $29 for Starter), what a compute unit actually is, the four costs stacked on top of your plan, the 7-day storage trap, and the settings that cut a bill in half.
Our Apify review in a nutshell
Apify is a cloud platform for web scraping and browser automation. Every scraper on it is an Actor: a small program that runs on Apify's servers and drops its output into a dataset you can export as CSV, Excel or JSON. The Apify Store lists more than 100,000 ready-to-run Actors for Google Maps, Instagram, Amazon, TikTok, LinkedIn and any site you point them at. You can also write your own in JavaScript or Python.
The catch is the bill. Your plan is a usage credit: $19 on Starter, spent on compute units (one compute unit is 1 GB of memory for one hour, at $0.20). Paid Actors, residential proxies and storage come on top. Users love the product (4.8/5 from 818 Trustpilot reviews, 4.8/5 on Capterra), but the most common complaint is that a big run is hard to price in advance. In 2026 Apify cut its compute unit price and brought Starter down to $19.
Our verdict: 4.2/5. Pick Apify if you want a scraper running in ten minutes, or managed infrastructure for scrapers you write yourself. Look at Browse AI if you don't code at all, and Bright Data if you scrape millions of pages from heavily protected sites.
The numbers speak. Want to try Apify?
What Apify costs, plan by plan
On Apify, your plan price doubles as a credit. Pay $19 for Starter and you get $19 of usage to spend that month on compute units, proxies, storage and paid Actors. Unused credit expires at the end of the cycle. The higher the plan, the cheaper each compute unit.
Monthly prices in USD; yearly billing (10% off) is shown below each price
Free
Try an Actor
No credit card
- $5 of usage a month, then runs pause until next cycle
- Compute unit at $0.20
- 16 GB memory, 5 concurrent runs
- Residential proxy at $8/GB, 5 datacenter IPs
- Community support (Discord)
Starter
Regular use
$17/mo billed yearly
- $19 of usage included monthly
- Compute unit at $0.20
- 64 GB memory, 32 concurrent runs
- 30 datacenter IPs, then $1 per IP
- Chat support, Bronze Store discount
Scale
High volume
$179/mo billed yearly
- $199 of usage included monthly
- Compute unit at $0.16
- 256 GB memory, 128 concurrent runs
- Residential proxy at $7.50/GB, 200 datacenter IPs
- Priority chat, Silver discount
Business
Data teams
$899/mo billed yearly
- $999 of usage included monthly
- Compute unit at $0.13
- 512 GB memory, 256 concurrent runs
- Residential proxy at $7/GB, 500 datacenter IPs
- Account manager, Gold discount
Example: 2 CUs a day
One mid-sized daily scraper
Fits inside the Starter credit
- A 4 GB Actor running 30 minutes: 2 compute units
- 2 CUs at $0.20: $0.40 a day
- 30 days: $12, under Starter's $19
- Add proxies and the Actor's own price if it's paid
Discounts
Ask before paying full price
Custom discount for nonprofits
- Students: 30% off Starter and Scale
- Startups: 30% off Scale
- Creator plan: $1/mo plus a one-time $500 of usage for 6 months
- Enterprise: custom quote
Prices read in 2026 on Apify's official pricing page, in USD before tax. One compute unit equals 1 GB of memory for one hour. Past the included credit, paid plans bill overage up to a limit you set. Many articles still list Starter at $39 or $29 and compute units at $0.30: those are no longer the official rates.
What users actually say about Apify
- 5★13
- 4★2
- 3★0
- 2★0
- 1★0
Across these 15 G2 and Capterra reviews, Apify averages a striking 4.9/5, and every single reviewer would recommend it. The recurring hero is the Actor Store: people describe finding a ready-made scraper, configuring it in around 20 minutes, and immediately piping clean data into AI agents, n8n, or Claude-based pipelines instead of coding scrapers from scratch. Reviewers consistently praise the reliable cloud execution, scheduling, and how much manual research time it removes each week. Two friction points dominate the criticism. First, pricing: several reviewers find the layered model of platform credits plus per-Actor costs hard to predict, and a few wish it were simply cheaper. Second, the learning curve and UI: building custom Actors needs real coding skill, the console can feel cluttered, and community-maintained Actors occasionally break when target sites change. A handful of Store sellers also flag opaque discovery rankings and a strict identity-verification flow.
Most loved
- +Actor Store turns weeks of scraper coding into a 20-minute setup
- +Reliable cloud execution with scheduling and clean data output
- +Slots neatly into AI workflows (n8n, Cursor, Claude pipelines)
- +Removes hours of manual research and infrastructure maintenance
- +Responsive customer support that genuinely knows the product
Watch-outs
- !Layered pricing (credits plus per-Actor costs) is hard to predict
- !Several reviewers simply find it expensive
- !Steep learning curve and a cluttered console for beginners
- !Community Actors can break when target sites change
- !Store discovery is opaque and identity verification can be strict
- Adam P. via G2
This has literally saved me so much time that it’s spared me from having to hire a VA. I couldn’t be happier! The price feels very expensive, and I’d really like to see cheaper options.
- Gil N. via G2
A very stable API marketplace platform, with a good customer support. Nothing in particular, they provide exactly what I expected
- Jigar v. via G2
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. 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.
- Victor S. via G2
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. 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.
- Asher S. via G2
I'm a computer science student from Namibia who started building web scraping actors on Apify about 6 months ago. I now have 2 live monetized actors on the Apify Store covering African real estate and e-commerce data, and I've already received my first payout. The free tier limits make it difficult to test actors thoroughly before publishing, running out of compute credits mid-test is frustrating when you're still in development. The automated quality testing system that flags actors as "under maintenance" can also be overly aggressive; it flagged my actor repeatedly even after fixing the issue, which temporarily hurt my store visibility. Better documentation around the input schema defaults required for automated testing would save new developers a lot of time.
- Louis J. via Capterra
Steep Learning Curve for Custom Actors: Building complex, bespoke scrapers requires solid coding knowledge. Pricing Can Explode Quickly: Memory consumption and proxy usage costs can accumulate rapidly on large-scale runs. Platform-Dependent Breaking: If a target website updates its UI, the corresponding Actor breaks until updated. Complex Documentation: While detailed, the sheer volume of documentation can be overwhelming for beginners. UI Clutter: The cloud console has so many features that navigating it feels a bit cluttered initially. Credit Burn on Failed Runs: If a custom script loops or fails, it still consumes your paid computing credits.
We compared Apify on five criteria.
One score per criterion, against Bright Data, Browse AI and Firecrawl, with the wins and the catches.
Is Apify easy to pick up?
For running an existing scraper, yes. Search "Google Maps" in the Store, open the Actor, fill in a form (keywords, location, max results) and hit Start. Results land in a table you can export to CSV or Excel. Several users report getting their first dataset in about 20 minutes.
The friction shows up next. Every Actor has its own inputs, and the quality of its docs depends on whoever built it. You need to understand memory allocation (it sets how many compute units you burn), proxy choice (the intermediate IPs that keep you from getting blocked), and the difference between a run, a dataset and a scheduled task.
To build your own Actor, Apify gives you starter templates, a CLI (apify push deploys your code) and Crawlee, its open-source library for JavaScript and Python. Developers will feel at home. Non-technical marketers will find Browse AI, which learns by watching you click, easier.
The fastest way to get web data without code, thanks to the Store. Step outside the defaults and you need some technical footing.
What does Apify really cost?
The entry price is low: $5 of free usage every month, then $19 a month on Starter ($17 yearly). But the plan is just a credit. Your real bill adds up four lines.
One, compute units. One compute unit is 1 GB of memory for one hour, priced at $0.20 on Free and Starter, $0.16 on Scale and $0.13 on Business. An Actor set to 4 GB that runs 30 minutes uses 2 compute units, or $0.40 on Starter. Two, the Actor's own price: many Store Actors charge per result or per event, typically a few dollars per 1,000 Google Maps places. Three, residential proxies at $8/GB on Starter, which often outgrow compute costs on protected sites. Four, storage, if you keep lots of datasets around.
Against competitors, Apify holds up well at small and mid volumes. Bright Data's Web Scraper API starts at $1.50 per 1,000 records pay-as-you-go. Firecrawl, built for AI pipelines, starts at $19 a month for 5,000 pages. The recurring complaint about Apify stays the same: failed runs burn compute units too, and big runs are hard to estimate up front. Set a usage limit in billing before any large job.
Excellent to start and at mid volumes. At scale, price out compute units, proxies and the Actor's fee before you pick a plan.
What can Apify do beyond basic scraping?
A lot. The Store lists more than 100,000 Actors covering social networks, maps, e-commerce, job boards and search engines, plus generic crawlers (Web Scraper, Website Content Crawler) that adapt to any site. Every run happens in the cloud with logs, retries and scheduling (every morning at 8, say).
The platform handles what usually breaks a homemade scraper: proxy rotation, headless browsers (Playwright, Puppeteer) for JavaScript-heavy sites, request queues and storage. Output goes to datasets, key-value stores or request queues, all reachable by API. Crawlee, the MIT-licensed open-source library, means your scraper code also runs off Apify, so there's no lock-in.
For AI work, Apify ships an official MCP server (the protocol that lets an assistant like Claude call tools). Your agent can find an Actor, run it and read the results. The flip side of a huge catalog is uneven quality. A community Actor can break when the target site changes, and Apify eventually pulls those stuck under maintenance. Check rating, user count and last update before you rely on one.
The most complete scraping platform we compared. The Store is its biggest strength, and its weak spot when an Actor goes unmaintained.
Sold on the details? Start a Apify trial.
Can you count on Apify's support?
It depends on your plan and on the Actor. Free gets you the Discord community and the docs, which are extensive (Academy courses, tutorials, help center). Chat comes with Starter, priority chat with Scale, and an account manager with Business.
Key point: a Store Actor is often built by an independent developer, not Apify. When it breaks, its author fixes it through the Issues tab on its page. Apify-maintained Actors and active authors respond fast; others can stay broken for days. On Trustpilot, Apify holds 4.8/5 from 818 reviews, with a few gripes about slow company verification.
On security, Apify is SOC 2 Type II compliant. Its Trust Center lists subprocessors, and the SOC 2 report is available under NDA. If your legal team needs a DPA, ask before you sign.
Solid support from Starter up and strong docs. For a community Actor, your real support line is its author.
Does Apify plug into the rest of your tools?
Yes, and it's one of its strengths. A documented REST API starts Actors, fetches datasets and schedules tasks. Webhooks ping another tool when a run succeeds or fails. Apify has official apps for Make, n8n and Zapier, and pushes results to Google Sheets, Google Drive or Slack.
A classic setup: Make triggers the Google Maps Actor every Monday, waits for the run to finish, then pushes new listings into your CRM. With Zapier, use an Apify webhook instead of polling, so the data arrives right away instead of on the next check.
For AI agents, the MCP server connects to Claude, Cursor or VS Code, hosted (mcp.apify.com, OAuth sign-in) or local. It deliberately leaves out full-permission Actors: running those stays a human call.
Everything you need to wire Apify into automations: API, webhooks, Make, n8n, Zapier and MCP.
Six ways to keep your Apify bill in check
These settings come from Apify's docs and from its user community. They prevent the two most common bad surprises: a bill that spikes and data that vanishes.
Set a usage limit before your first big run
Do this firstOn paid plans, Apify bills overage past your included credit, up to a limit you choose. Set it in billing on day one. In each run's options, also cap max results or max cost per run, so a misconfigured Actor stops before it drains your credit.
- Where
- Billing settings and run options
- Payoff
- No surprise invoice
Lower your Actors' memory
Compute units are memory times duration. An Actor at 4 GB costs twice as much as at 2 GB for the same runtime. Run a small batch, check actual memory use in the run stats, then dial the setting down. Plain HTML scrapers often do fine with little memory; full browsers need more.
- 1 compute unit
- 1 GB for 1 hour
- Starter price
- $0.20
Skip the browser when HTML is enough
Playwright and Puppeteer Actors spin up a real browser: slow and memory-hungry. If the data is already in the page source, an HTML crawler (Cheerio or BeautifulSoup) does the same job for a fraction of the cost. Most users who complain about compute units melting away run a browser they don't need.
- Browser
- JavaScript sites, logins
- HTML
- Static pages, much faster
Name your datasets so they don't disappear
Common trapAn unnamed dataset is deleted after 7 days. If your scheduled scraper writes to its default dataset, last fortnight's results are gone. Name the dataset (in the Console or via API) to keep it indefinitely, or export automatically to Google Sheets or your warehouse after each run.
- Unnamed
- Deleted after 7 days
- Named
- Kept
Prefer pay-per-result Actors for predictable costs
Open the Pricing tab on any Store Actor. Pay-per-result Actors include platform usage, so you know upfront what 1,000 items cost. Usage-based Actors depend on memory and runtime. If your budget has to be predictable, pay-per-result is safer. Compare two or three Actors for the same site too: price and reliability gaps are wide.
- Per result
- Known cost upfront
- Per usage
- Depends on memory and runtime
Claim the student or startup discount
Apify gives students 30% off Starter and Scale, and startups 30% off Scale. Nonprofits get a custom discount. On Scale, 30% is close to $60 saved each month. Yearly billing adds 10%: $179 instead of $199 on Scale. Unused credit expires monthly, so don't buy a bigger plan "just in case".
- Startups
- 30% off Scale
- Yearly
- 10% off
Five tools worth a look
Apify isn't the right fit for everyone. Each of these five tools wins on one specific point: no-code, huge volumes, AI-ready data or a flat price. Each card also states the catch.
Browse AI: scraping without a line of code
No-codeBrowse AI learns what to extract while you click through the page, then monitors it for changes. For a marketer tracking prices or listings, it's simpler than Apify. The free plan gives 50 credits a month; Personal is $19/mo billed yearly ($48 monthly), Professional $69 ($87).
The catch: credits go fast at volume, and it lacks the depth of Apify's Store. Full details in our Browse AI review.
- Price
- From $19/mo billed yearly
- Best for
- No-code page monitoring
- Catch
- 50 credits on free
Bright Data: for huge volumes and protected sites
High volumeBright Data is a proxy network first, with scraping APIs on top. Its Web Scraper API costs $1.50 per 1,000 records pay-as-you-go, and you only pay for delivered records. The Scale plan is $499 a month for 384,000 records. The first 5,000 records a month are free.
The catch: a sprawling product line that's harder to read, aimed mainly at data teams. To choose, read our Apify vs Bright Data comparison.
- Price
- $1.50 per 1,000 records
- Best for
- Data teams, hard targets
- Catch
- Complex offer
Firecrawl: clean web pages for your AI agents
AIFirecrawl turns websites into clean Markdown ready for an LLM. For feeding an assistant or a RAG knowledge base, it gets there faster than Apify. Free covers 1,000 pages; Hobby is $19 a month for 5,000 pages ($16 yearly), Standard $99 for 100,000 pages.
The catch: it extracts pages, not structured data from Google Maps or Instagram the way specialized Actors do.
- Price
- From $16/mo billed yearly
- Best for
- RAG, AI agents
- Catch
- No specialized scrapers
Octoparse: desktop scraping at a flat price
Flat priceOctoparse is point-and-click from a desktop app, with hundreds of ready templates. Its edge over Apify is a flat price. Free allows 10 tasks; Standard is $69 a month billed yearly, Professional $249.
The catch: less flexible for developers, and cloud runs are capped in parallel (3 processes on Standard).
- Price
- From $69/mo billed yearly
- Best for
- Fixed budgets, no code
- Catch
- 3 cloud processes on Standard
Crawlee: Apify's engine, free on your own server
Open sourceCrawlee is the open-source library Apify maintains, MIT-licensed, for JavaScript and Python. Install it on your own server and you pay Apify nothing. It's the right path if you have a developer and steady high volume.
The catch: hosting, proxies, scheduling and maintenance are all on you. When you want to hand that off, the same code deploys to Apify.
- Price
- Free
- Best for
- Developers, high volume
- Catch
- You run the infrastructure
Do you make a tool in this category? Email us: hello@hackceleration.com
Is Apify right for you?
Three situations, three answers. Then six checks before you pay.
Yes, if you want data fast with no servers
You need Google Maps listings for outbound, competitor prices every week, or customer reviews to analyze. A Store Actor does the job, and Make or n8n route the results wherever you want. To set up a clean first workflow, Apify training built around your real use case saves you from the settings that get expensive.
Careful if you need a fixed budget
Compute units, proxies and paid Actors make the bill move month to month. Set a usage limit, prefer pay-per-result Actors, or look at Octoparse and Browse AI, which charge a flat price.
No, if you plan to mass-scrape personal data
Public doesn't mean free to use. Under GDPR and US state privacy laws like the CCPA, personal data stays regulated, and LinkedIn bans scraping in its terms. Apify doesn't take that responsibility off you. Get a lawyer to sign off first.
- You ran the target Actor on the free plan and noted its cost per 100 results
- You read the Actor's Pricing tab: per result, per event or per usage
- You checked its rating, user count and last update
- You set a usage limit in billing
- Your key datasets are named, or exported automatically
- You're not collecting personal data without a legal basis
What are you actually here for?
Tools that beat Apify on one specific point, and who they suit.
You're weighing Bright DataApify vs Bright DataScraper marketplace or proxy network: the pick depends on volume.
You don't want to codeApify vs Browse AIActor Store or no-code robot: which one to choose.
You're comparing every toolBest web scraping toolsOur full ranking of web scraping tools.
You'd rather have it set up for youApify agencyWhat we build on Apify, and how long it takes.
You'd rather learn to run itApify trainingAn expert opens Apify with you and works on your real case.
Frequently asked questions
Is Apify really free?
Yes. The Free plan is free forever with no credit card. It includes $5 of usage a month, which is 25 compute units at $0.20. Once that's spent, your runs pause until the next cycle, so you can't get billed by surprise. It's enough to try several Actors and pull a few thousand simple results.
What is an Apify compute unit?
It's Apify's billing unit for compute: 1 GB of memory used for one hour. An Actor at 2 GB running 15 minutes uses 0.5 compute units. It costs $0.20 on Free and Starter, $0.16 on Scale and $0.13 on Business. Building an Actor also consumes compute units.
Why is my Apify bill higher than my plan price?
Because the plan is a credit and you allowed overage. Past Starter's $19, Apify bills extra usage up to your usage limit. Usual culprits: a pay-per-result Actor, residential proxies at $8/GB, or memory set too high. Check per-run costs in the Usage tab to find the leak.
How much does scraping Google Maps with Apify cost?
Expect a few dollars per 1,000 places with the official pay-per-event Actor, depending on add-ons like reviews, images or contact details. Community Actors list lower prices with mixed reliability. Run 100 places on the free plan first to see the real cost of your setup.
Is Apify better than writing my own scraper with Scrapy or Playwright?
For one-off or mid-sized jobs, usually yes: Apify handles proxies, retries, scheduling and storage you'd otherwise build yourself. For steady, very high volume with an in-house developer, self-hosting Crawlee or Scrapy can cost less. Apify's own Crawlee library lets you start self-hosted and move to Apify later without rewriting.
How long does Apify keep my data?
Unnamed datasets are deleted after 7 days. Name a dataset to keep it, or export to Google Sheets, S3 or your database at the end of each run. Long-term storage also draws on your credit.
Does Apify work with ChatGPT or Claude?
Yes. Apify's official MCP server lets Claude, Cursor or VS Code search for an Actor, run it and read the results. The hosted version signs in with OAuth at mcp.apify.com. Full-permission Actors are excluded for safety.
Is Apify secure and GDPR compliant?
Apify is a European company based in Prague and SOC 2 Type II compliant. Its Trust Center lists subprocessors, and the SOC 2 report is available under NDA. Whether your scraping is compliant depends on what you collect: you're the data controller.
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