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 Hugging Face
A side-by-side look at the closest alternative in this category.
Apify
Apify
Hugging Face
Hugging Face
Free plan with $5 platform credits/month. Starter $49/month. Scale $499/month. Enterprise custom.
Free for most models and Spaces. Pro $9/month for private models, priority inference, and ZeroGPU. Enterprise Hub from $20/user/month for team collaboration and security.
Review Apify's data handling policy. Scraped web content and proxy traffic processed on Apify's infrastructure.
Enterprise Hub includes SSO, access controls, audit logs, and private infrastructure. SOC 2 compliant.
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.
Public models and datasets are openly accessible. Enterprise Hub provides private model storage with data handling agreements. Review individual model licences before commercial deployment.
- 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
- De facto standard hub for open source AI models with 500,000+ available
- Transformers library provides consistent API for diverse model families
- Spaces enable easy demo deployment without web infrastructure
- Free for public models and strong community support
- 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
- Technical platform primarily for developers and researchers
- Inference API quality varies for very large or complex models
- Navigation complexity increases with scale of the platform
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.