Apify Review (2026): Features, Use Cases, My Verdict

The Apify Store now lists more than 114,000 ready-made scrapers. It calls them Actors, and most charge per result.

On the free plan, one add-on in its most popular Actor costs 20 times its Starter price.

So for this Apify review, we pulled prices and 30 days of run data for ten busy Actors. All of it came straight from Apify’s own API.

The numbers show which Actors you can trust, and where the free plan‘s $5 goes.

Is Apify worth it, or only a giant scraper shop?

Apify is worth it when a well-kept Actor already does your job. You skip building, hosting and fixing a scraper yourself.

The platform around the Store is strong too. Runs, schedules, storage, proxies and dozens of integrations all live in one account.

The trade-off is pricing you have to study. There are three billing models, and Actor quality depends on who built it.

• Best for: marketers, analysts and developers who need data from Google Maps, social platforms or search results, without writing scrapers.
• Not ideal for: anyone who wants one flat monthly price, or a few pages of clean text for an LLM.

Our 8.1 score rests on Apify’s pricing, docs and public run data, not on paid runs of our own. The full score, pros and cons are in the review box.

What did we check, and what didn’t we run?

We didn’t run paid jobs on the Apify cloud for this review. So we won’t quote run times or data quality from our own account.

Instead, on 11 November 2026 we pulled data from Apify’s public API. That gave us the Store’s Actor count, per-plan prices and 30-day run counts for ten busy Actors.

We also read the pricing page, the limits and storage docs, and each Actor’s pricing tiers.

We’ve run Crawlee, Apify’s open-source scraping library, on our own machine. In October 2026, its browser crawler got 10 of 10 quotes from a JavaScript test page. The plain HTTP crawler got none.

That matters here because Website Content Crawler, one of Apify’s flagship Actors, is built on Crawlee.

And the money part: we earn a commission if you sign up through our links. The numbers below come straight from Apify either way.

What does Apify give you for the money?

Apify is a cloud platform for running Actors. Each one is a small program that scrapes a site, drives a browser or calls an AI model.

You don’t need to know how they work inside. You fill in a form, press start and collect rows of data.

Around that loop sits the rest of the platform:

• Apify Store. 114,249 public Actors on the day we checked, from Google Maps to TikTok scrapers.
• Runs and schedules. Start an Actor from the Console, the API or a schedule, and get a webhook when it finishes.
• Storage. Results land in datasets you can export as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, HTML or RSS.
• Proxies. Datacenter, residential and Google search proxies are built in, plus an Unblocker for tougher sites.
• Integrations. Make, n8n, Zapier, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Pinecone, Google Drive and Slack, among many others.
• AI agent access. An open-source MCP server lets Claude, Cursor or ChatGPT pick and run Actors for you.
• Build your own. Templates in JavaScript, TypeScript and Python, plus Crawlee, Apify’s open-source library with 26,000+ GitHub stars.

New to wiring AI agents to outside tools?

Our guide to connecting an MCP server shows how that part works.

Our take: The Store is the product. The scheduling, storage and integrations are solid. But you pay for Apify because someone else already wrote the scraper you need, and keeps fixing it.

Which jobs is Apify best at?

Apify shines when your data lives on one big platform that a popular Actor already covers. Here are the five jobs we’d use it for, with Starter-plan prices.

Lead lists from Google Maps

The Google Maps Scraper, published by Compass, is the Store’s most popular Actor, with more than 690,000 users. It costs $3 per 1,000 places on Starter.

Contact details, emails and social profiles are paid add-ons on top. If you plan cold outreach, read our cold email outreach guide before you pull 10,000 leads.

Social media monitoring

Apify’s own Instagram Scraper ran 19.2 million times in 30 days. It charges $2.30 per 1,000 results on Starter.

The TikTok Scraper and YouTube Scraper both cost $3 per 1,000 results. All three are among the busiest Actors in the Store.

Search results for SEO and AI visibility

The Google Search Results Scraper costs $2.50 per 1,000 result pages on Starter. Add-ons capture AI Overviews and answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini.

That makes it a cheap way to track rankings at scale. Our guide to scraping Google search results safely covers the risks.

Website content for RAG and AI agents

Website Content Crawler bills by usage. At $0.25 per compute unit, its README estimates about $0.20 per 1,000 pages with plain HTTP.

With a headless browser, the same README puts it at $0.50 to $5 per 1,000 pages, depending on the site.

For one-off pages, the RAG Web Browser Actor charges $1.90 per 1,000 fetched pages on Starter. Both feed clean text into a RAG pipeline.

Your own scrapers, hosted for you

Developers can build an Actor with Crawlee or the Apify SDK and run it on Apify’s servers. The Creator plan costs $1 a month with a one-time $500 of usage for six months. The catch: it limits which Store Actors you can run.

Publish it in the Store and you can charge others to use it. In November 2026, Apify’s pricing page said it had paid developers $1.7 million the month before.

How reliable are Apify’s Actors, really?

The busy Actors we checked finished between 96.1% and 99.8% of their runs over 30 days.

That figure counts aborted and timed-out runs as failures. The Store’s own success figure leaves those out, so it looks friendlier.

Take Website Content Crawler. Counting only failed runs, it succeeds 99.9% of the time. Count its 118,011 timed-out runs too, and that drops to 96.3%.

Is 96% bad?

Not really. A long crawl stops when it hits its run timeout, which you can raise in the run settings.

But a finished run isn’t proof of good data. A run can succeed and still return nothing useful if the site changed its layout.

Ratings vary more than run stats

Apify’s own Instagram Scraper scores 4.7 out of 5 from 608 reviews. The Google Maps Scraper scores 4.7 from 1,823.

Community Actors swing wider. A popular LinkedIn profile scraper sits at 3.0 from 156 reviews, and a leads finder at 3.4 from 540.

Before you pay for any Actor, check five things:

• Who publishes it: Apify’s own team, a known partner, or an unknown account.
• The rating and how many reviews sit behind it.
• Its runs over the last 30 days, and how many failed or timed out.
• When it was last updated, since a site redesign can break a stale Actor overnight.
• Its pricing model: per event, per usage, or both.

What does Apify cost once the free $5 runs out?

Apify is free with $5 of usage a month. Paid plans cost $19, $199 or $999 a month, and each includes the same amount as prepaid usage.

These are US prices from the official pricing page, checked 11 November 2026. Yearly billing takes 10% off.

Most Store Actors bill per event, usually per result. Pay-per-usage Actors and your own Actors bill compute units instead. One unit is 1 GB of memory running for an hour.

Proxies and storage add their own small fees. Residential proxies, for example, cost $8 per GB on Free and Starter.

Remember the free plan’s $5 from the top?

Here’s where it goes. The same Actor charges its highest price per result on the free plan.

The Google Search Results Scraper charges $4.50 per 1,000 pages on Free and $2.50 on Starter. That’s 80% more for the same data.

Add-ons are where it gets silly. The Google Maps leads add-on costs $100 per 1,000 on Free, against $5 on Starter. The Google Search scraper’s AI Mode add-on costs 40 times more on Free.

So treat the free plan as a test drive. For the full breakdown of plans, discounts and proxy prices, see our Apify pricing guide.

Where does Apify fall short?

Three things could trip you up. None of them is hidden, but you’ll only find them if you read the docs.

Do they make Apify a bad deal?

No. They make it a deal you should test small first.

Three billing models on one invoice

Some Actors bill per event, some by usage, and some do both. Proxies, storage and data transfer can add to a usage-billed run.

You can’t price a job from the plan page alone. Run a small test, then read the usage chart in Billing.

Results vanish unless you name them

Default storage for each run is unnamed. On the free plan, Apify keeps your 10 most recent runs for four months, and older unnamed results get deleted.

Give a dataset a name and it stays, whatever your plan. On paid plans, you set the retention period in your billing settings.

Personal data is your problem, not Apify’s

Apify gives you the scraper, not permission to use what it collects. Leads, profiles and reviews often contain personal data.

Read our plain-English guide to whether web scraping is legal before you build a lead list. The same goes double for LinkedIn data.

How do you run your first Actor without overspending?

Start on the free plan, cap every run, and test small before you scale.

Our step-by-step guide to using Apify Actors without code walks through a full run with screenshots. To trigger other tools when a run ends, see how webhooks work.

Apify, Firecrawl or Crawlee: which fits your job?

Choose Apify for structured data from a specific platform. Choose Firecrawl when you only need clean text from any URL.

We priced the same jobs on both platforms in our Firecrawl vs Apify comparison. If you need raw proxy power instead, our Bright Data review covers a heavier, enterprise-style option.

My verdict: who should use Apify?

Apify is the best place we know to rent a scraper someone else maintains. Whether it’s right for you depends on the job.

• Data from Google Maps, Instagram, TikTok or Google: use Apify, because a busy Actor already handles each site’s changes.
• More than a test run or two a month: Starter at $19, because per-result prices drop once you leave Free.
• Whole websites as AI-ready text: compare Website Content Crawler with Firecrawl, because Firecrawl is simpler for plain Markdown.
• Developers with servers and time: run Crawlee yourself, because it’s free and it’s the library behind Website Content Crawler.

One warning before you scale any job. Check the Actor’s 30-day run stats and set a maximum charge, every time.

Frequently asked questions

The bottom line on Apify

This Apify review lands on one idea. You’re paying to rent scrapers that someone else keeps working. The Apify Store has one for almost every big platform.

Check the run data and cap every run. Move to the Starter plan as soon as the free $5 feels tight.

Your next step: open Apify and run one Actor with a one-dollar maximum charge. Check the dataset before you pay for anything.