Automation / Research / Agents

Apify

Actor platform for web scraping, automation, and AI agent data.

Apify helps teams run Actors for web scraping, crawling, data extraction, lead generation, market research, AI agent data, and repeatable web automation at scale.

Qidao take

Apify is strongest for web data extraction. It is a weaker fit for private data collection without compliance review.

Workflow fit

Web data extraction

Selection risk

Private data collection without compliance review

Evaluate with the Qidao selection framework

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Pricing: Free plan; Starter from $29/month plus pay-as-you-go
Free quota: Free plan includes $5 usage for Apify Store or own Actors; larger workloads use paid plans and compute-unit pricing.
API support: Available
Free plan: Yes
Open source: Yes
Self-hosted: No
Team fit: Strong for operators and builders who need repeatable web data collection, actor-based automation, and source-backed lead or market workflows.
Enterprise fit: Useful for enterprise data collection when proxy, anti-blocking, support, SLAs, compliance, and custom scraping requirements are reviewed.
Privacy risk: Medium to high: scraping targets, collected records, proxies, logs, and automation outputs can create compliance and data-use risk.
Language fit: Good for global web data collection; extraction quality depends on target sites, actor logic, and source-language handling.
Platforms: Web, API, CLI
Updated: Jul 3, 2026

Feature highlights

Actor marketplace and platform
Web scraping and crawling tools
MCP and API surfaces for agents

Official fact sources

Best for

Web data extraction
Lead generation
Market research automation

Not best for

Private data collection without compliance review
Simple LLM chat workflows

Pros

Large Actor ecosystem
Free entry and pay-as-you-go path
Strong fit for AI agent data workflows

Cons

Scraping compliance needs review
Actor quality varies
Proxy and compute costs need monitoring

Alternatives

FirecrawlWeb data API for search, scraping, crawling, and agent context.BrowserbaseBrowser infrastructure for web agents, automation, and data workflows.TavilySearch API designed for AI agents and research workflows.

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