Apify

Cloud platform for running web scrapers and automation actors

AI Data AnalysisFree planOverseasβ˜…β˜…β˜…β˜†β˜† 3.0

What is Apify?

Apify is a cloud platform for web scraping and browser automation, built around small containerised programs called actors. A large public store offers ready-made scrapers for common sites and data sources, and you can deploy your own using JavaScript or Python with the provided SDKs. The platform handles proxy rotation, scheduling, storage and monitoring, so scraping work that would otherwise need constant maintenance runs reliably. Many actors target the retrieval needs of AI systems - crawling documentation, extracting page content for embeddings - but Apify itself is scraping infrastructure, not a generative AI product.

Last updated: 2026-09-20. This site only provides an index; for exact features, pricing, and licensing, see the official website.

Key features

  • Public actor store with scrapers for many popular sites
  • Custom actors in JavaScript or Python with official SDKs
  • Proxy rotation and anti-blocking handled by the platform
  • Scheduling, webhooks and run monitoring with retry handling
  • Dataset and key-value storage accessible through a REST API
  • Website crawlers that prepare text for embedding pipelines

Pros & cons

Strengths

  • Removes the proxy and reliability work from scraping projects
  • Ready-made actors mean common targets need no development
  • Storage and API make scraped data easy to consume downstream

Watch out for

  • Costs scale with compute units and proxy traffic used
  • Website structure changes still break scrapers periodically
  • Site terms of service and legal limits remain your responsibility

Best for & use cases

web scraping, data collection, crawler pipelines and retrieval dataset preparation

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FAQ

Is it legal to scrape with Apify?

The platform provides the tooling; legality depends on the target site, its terms, local law and the data involved. Personal data and copyrighted content carry additional obligations, so review each target rather than assuming a scraper is safe to run.

Do I need to code?

For ready-made actors, no - you configure inputs and run them. Custom actors for unusual sites require JavaScript or Python, and maintaining selectors over time is the part that consumes ongoing effort.

How does it fit into an AI project?

Commonly as the collection layer: crawlers gather pages, and the text is cleaned and stored for embedding or retrieval. It does not generate or evaluate content, so the retrieval pipeline is still built elsewhere.