Apify

What Apify is

Apify is a cloud platform for web scraping, data extraction, and browser automation, founded in Prague in 2015. Its core building block is the Actor: a serverless cloud program that takes a JSON input, runs in the cloud for as long as needed, and writes results to a dataset or key-value store (per Apify's official documentation). Actors can be run manually from the Apify Console, on a schedule, or programmatically via the REST API, CLI, or webhooks, and can be chained together or wired into external tools.

On top of the platform sits Apify Store, a marketplace of ready-made Actors - Apify's marketing and a September 2025 CEO interview cite 6,000+ pre-built scrapers covering Google Maps, search engines, social media platforms, e-commerce sites, and general websites. Most Store Actors are built and maintained by independent creators, each with its own pricing model, which matters for buyers (see Limitations). Apify positions itself for audiences from individual developers to enterprises; an AWS case study describes 1,000+ organizations across 179 countries, and vendor claims put the customer count higher (25,000+, including Siemens, Microsoft, and Accenture).

Key features

• Actors (serverless scrapers/automations): run any browser or HTTP-based extraction job with configurable memory, concurrency, and scheduling. Runs can be resurrected, versioned, and monitored.
• Apify Store marketplace: thousands of ready-made Actors (Google Maps Extractor, Website Content Crawler, SERP scrapers, social media scrapers, e-commerce scrapers), with public stats like success rate and user ratings on each Actor page.
• Proxies and unblocking: residential proxies ($7-$8/GB depending on plan), datacenter proxies with plan-included IPs, SERPs proxy, and an Unblocker service - the infrastructure layer that makes large-scale scraping viable.
• Developer tooling: SDKs for JavaScript/Node.js and Python, the open-source Crawlee library, CLI, GitHub integration, and code templates for building custom Actors.
• Integrations: REST API, webhooks, an MCP Server for AI agents, and no-code connectors for Zapier, Make, n8n, Pipedream, and Albato - the main path for GTM teams to pipe data into Clay, Sheets, CRMs, and data warehouses.
• Compliance posture: SOC 2 Type II (independently audited, announced January 2025), published GDPR documentation, EU-based legal entity (Apify Technologies s.r.o., Prague), and a security whitepaper describing tenant isolation and data protection. Note these are platform-level certifications and disclosures covering Apify's own security controls - they do not make any particular scraper lawful; the legality of each scraping activity depends on the specific Actor, target site, data collected, and applicable jurisdiction, and is the user's responsibility to assess.

Pricing (verified from apify.com/pricing, 2026-10-31)

Apify uses a subscription-plus-usage model. Each plan includes prepaid platform-usage credits that pay for compute units (CUs), proxies, data transfer, and storage; excess usage is billed as overage on the next invoice. Published numbers:

Maximum spendable platform limits beyond prepaid credits (per Apify help docs): Free $5 (fixed), Starter $100, Scale $1,000, Business $5,000. Residential proxies cost $8/GB on Free/Starter, $7.50/GB on Scale, $7/GB on Business. A $1/month Creator plan ($500 one-time platform usage for the first 6 months) targets developers publishing their own Actors. Unused credits do not roll over between billing cycles.

Store Actor pricing is separate. Example: the popular Google Maps Extractor (Compass) uses pay-per-event pricing of $5.00/1,000 places on Free, $4.00 on Starter, $3.00 on Scale, and $2.10 on Business, with add-on charges for filters, contact details, and reviews.

Use cases for B2B sales and GTM teams

• Prospect list building from public sources: run a Google Maps Actor by keyword and location to get businesses with addresses, phones, and websites, then enrich via Clay or push to CRM. At Business-tier pricing, 10,000 places costs roughly $21 in Actor fees plus platform usage - cheap relative to purchased lists, though contact enrichment still needs a separate vendor.
• Feeding AI/SDR workflows: the Website Content Crawler plus the MCP Server let teams pull structured website content into LLM-based research, personalization, and agent workflows.
• Recurring competitive monitoring: schedule Actors to track competitor pricing, product catalogs, job postings, or review sentiment on a schedule, with webhook notifications into Slack or Sheets via Zapier/Make.
• Signal-based prospecting: SERP and news/directory scrapers feed intent and tech-stack signals into lead scoring before outreach.

Verdict

For RevOps and GTM teams, Apify is best understood as data infrastructure, not a data product: the marketplace usually has an Actor for the public source you need, the API/integration surface makes it easy to route results into Clay, CRM, or a warehouse, and the platform-level security posture (SOC 2 Type II, GDPR documentation) helps clear internal security review in ways most scraping tools cannot - though it does not by itself make any given scraping activity lawful; compliance for each Actor, target site, data type, and jurisdiction remains the user's responsibility. The trade-offs are real but manageable: budget for the all-in cost (plan + CUs + proxies + per-result fees), vet individual Store Actors before building workflows on them, and expect to do enrichment and data hygiene downstream. Teams without any technical resource should first compare turnkey B2B databases; teams with even one engineer or a GTM-ops workflow builder should shortlist Apify as the default extraction layer.

Disclosure: this listing participates in Apify's affiliate program. Pricing and figures above were verified against Apify's official pages on 2026-10-31; marketplace-size and customer-count figures are vendor claims.

How we verified this review

All pricing tables, plan limits, proxy rates, and the free-tier terms in this review were checked against Apify's own pages on 2026-10-31: the public pricing page, the Creator plan page, the help-center article on platform limits, and the Google Maps Extractor Actor pricing page. Platform capabilities (Actors, Store, SDKs, integrations, MCP) come from the official documentation and integrations pages. Compliance statements reflect Apify's security documentation and its January 2025 SOC 2 Type II announcement; they describe platform-level certifications that do not imply the lawfulness of any specific scraping activity, which depends on the individual scraper, target site, data, and jurisdiction and remains the user's responsibility. Company-size and marketplace-growth figures come from an AWS customer case study and a September 2025 founder interview, and are labeled as vendor claims rather than independently audited facts. This review is based on published sources only - no hands-on testing was performed, and no performance or reliability ratings are asserted beyond figures Apify itself publishes on Actor pages (such as success rates and user ratings, which are vendor-reported metrics, not our own test results).