# Apify

> Cloud platform and marketplace for web scraping, automation, and AI data extraction.

Apify is a cloud web scraping and browser automation platform featuring a store of tens of thousands of ready-to-run bots called Actors. It enables users to extract structured data from websites and social networks without writing scrapers from scratch, while also offering developers an environment to build, deploy, and monetize custom scraping tools.

Website: https://apify.com/

## What it is for

- Scrape social media metrics and posts from Instagram or TikTok without coding
- Extract business leads, reviews, and contact info from Google Maps listings
- Crawl websites and convert pages into clean markdown for AI models and RAG pipelines
- Monitor competitor product pricing and stock status across e-commerce sites

## Features

- Apify Store with thousands of ready-made Actors for major platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Google Maps
- Export datasets in formats including JSON and CSV
- REST API, CLI, and SDKs (Python, JavaScript) for programmatic execution and scheduling
- Model Context Protocol (MCP) server support to plug data crawlers into AI agents
- Built-in anti-blocking tools with proxy rotation to avoid IP bans
- Open-source Crawlee framework integration for custom web crawling pipelines
- Monetization tools for developers to publish and sell custom Actors

## Pricing

Freemium. Free tier with monthly platform credits, paid tiers based on compute and storage usage.

## Details

- Type: Web app
- Category: [Development](https://xiry.app/topics/development.md)
- Topic: [Web Scraping](https://xiry.app/topics/development/web-scraping.md)
- Open source: no
- Platforms: Web, API, Command line
- For: Developers, data analysts, marketers, and AI engineers needing web data extraction at scale.
- Alternative to: Octoparse, Bright Data, ScrapingBee, Browse AI
- Tags: scraping, crawling, automation, actors, data extraction, mcp

## Why it was saved

- [@digitalsamaritan, 12 February 2025](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DF-ozvEprmS/): Enables extracting social media data such as posts, view counts, likes, and comments from your account or competitors without coding.
- [@digitalsamaritan, 13 October 2024](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DBFCobACNw6/): Enables anyone to scrape leads, social media posts, comments, or website content into structured data without needing to write any code.

## Compare

- [Alternatives to Octoparse](https://xiry.app/alternatives/octoparse.md)
- [Alternatives to Browse AI](https://xiry.app/alternatives/browse-ai.md)

## Related

- [Firecrawl](https://xiry.app/resources/firecrawl-1984): Turn websites and documents into clean, LLM-ready markdown or structured data. (Website, Freemium)
- [Parse](https://xiry.app/resources/parse): Turn any website into a structured REST API using natural language (Web app, Freemium)
- [ScrapeGraphAI](https://xiry.app/resources/scrapegraphai): Open-source Python library and API for prompt-based web scraping using LLMs (GitHub repo, Freemium)
- [Chat4Data](https://xiry.app/resources/chat4data): AI Chrome extension for scraping web data using natural language chat prompts. (Browser extension, Freemium)
- [Cloud Scraping Browsers Comparison](https://xiry.app/resources/cloud-scraping-browsers-comparison): Feature and cost breakdown across cloud browser sandbox providers for scraping (Framework, Free)
- [Cloudflare /crawl Endpoint](https://xiry.app/resources/cloudflare-crawl-endpoint): Single API endpoint to crawl entire websites to Markdown, HTML, or JSON (Tip, Freemium)

Updated 3 October 2026. Page: https://xiry.app/resources/apify

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