Apify

What Is Apify?

The numbers tell the story. 25,000+ pre-built scraping and automation tools — Apify calls them Actors — in the marketplace. 155 employees in a single Prague office at the Lucerna Palace. A monthly developer payout of around $760,000 to third-party Actor authors as of early 2026, and a G2 ranking inside the top 10 software products globally. These metrics describe one of the largest active web-data ecosystems in Europe, built by a Czech company that has been quietly compounding since 2015.

Apify was founded in Prague by Jan Čurn and Jakub Balada with a specific architectural bet: that the web-scraping problem is best solved as a marketplace of containerised, runnable programs rather than as a single monolithic SaaS product. The bet has paid off in volume. Where a traditional scraping product gives users one tool that does many things adequately, Apify gives users access to thousands of tools, each specialised for a specific data source — Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Google Maps, Amazon, and thousands more — published either by Apify itself or by a global developer community that earns revenue when their Actors are used.

The result is a platform that occupies a category Zapier and Make do not — extracting structured data from websites that do not have APIs — at a scale and developer-payout volume that no other European data-tooling company currently approaches.

Key Features

The Actors Marketplace at Scale

The Apify Store currently lists 25,000+ Actors. The category coverage is wide: every major social platform, e-commerce site, search engine, real estate portal, job board, and review site has at least one Actor, often many. For common scraping needs, the workflow is configure-and-run rather than build-from-scratch. Inputs are typically URLs, search queries, or filters; outputs are structured JSON or CSV that can be exported, posted to a webhook, or piped into a downstream pipeline.

The marketplace economics matter as much as the volume. Apify pays out hundreds of thousands of dollars per month to Actor developers (around $760,000 in a recent monthly disclosure) which creates real incentive for developers to maintain and improve their Actors when target sites change their structure. This is a meaningful operational difference from internal-only scraping tools that depend on a single team to chase site changes.

Apify SDK and Crawlee Library

For custom requirements that the marketplace does not cover, Apify offers a Node.js and Python SDK plus the open-source Crawlee library, which handles the unglamorous infrastructure of production web scraping: proxy rotation, browser fingerprint randomisation, automatic retries with backoff, request queue management, and CAPTCHA evasion. Crawlee has become an open-source project in its own right, used outside the Apify platform by teams that want production-grade scraping primitives.

The combination of pre-built Actors plus a custom-development SDK plus a battle-tested open-source library covers the full range from no-code through enterprise data engineering.

Proxy Infrastructure and Browser Automation

Web scraping at scale requires proxies. Apify offers residential proxies (real ISP IPs, harder to block), datacenter proxies (cheaper, faster, but easier to block), and SERP proxies (specifically for search-engine result page scraping). Proxy bandwidth is metered separately from compute, which is a source of pricing complexity but also of cost transparency.

Browser automation is handled via Puppeteer and Playwright, both supported as first-class environments with managed browser pools. For sites that depend on JavaScript rendering and cannot be scraped with simple HTTP requests, this is essential.

MCP Server and AI Integration

The most recent product additions reflect where the data-extraction market is heading. Apify added a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server in 2025, which means Actors can be invoked directly from Claude Desktop, Cursor, and other LLM-based agents as tool calls. LangChain and LlamaIndex integrations are also first-class. For teams building AI training data pipelines, RAG systems, or agentic applications, Apify becomes the data-acquisition layer rather than a separate scraping tool.

Pricing

Apify's pricing structure is hybrid subscription-plus-usage, which requires careful attention. The Free tier includes $5 of monthly platform credits with no credit card required — genuinely usable for small extraction jobs. Starter at $29/month includes $29 of platform credits and is the entry point for regular use. Scale at $199/month includes $199 of credits and adds priority support. Business at $999/month includes $999 of credits, lower per-compute-unit rates ($0.13/CU vs $0.20/CU on Free), a dedicated account manager, and advanced security features. Enterprise is custom-quoted and includes SSO, dedicated infrastructure options, and custom SLAs.

The complexity comes from three meters running in parallel: compute units (the runtime cost of Actor execution), proxy bandwidth (especially residential proxies, which often exceed compute costs at moderate volume), and storage operations (datasets, key-value stores, request queues). Some third-party Actors in the marketplace also charge additional usage fees on top of platform compute. G2 reviewers consistently cite pricing complexity as the platform's main friction point — the underlying value is real, but cost forecasting requires close monitoring of each meter.

For predictable workloads, the Business plan's lower per-CU rate and dedicated account manager pay back the higher base cost. For unpredictable workloads, the pay-as-you-go top-up after credits are exhausted means there is no hard ceiling on cost.

EU Compliance and Privacy

Apify Technologies s.r.o. is headquartered in Prague, Czech Republic, an EU member state, and is fully subject to EU GDPR. Customer data is hosted in the European Union, removing the transatlantic data transfer concerns that affect US-headquartered scraping platforms.

The compliance credentials are stronger than most platforms in this category. Apify is SOC 2 certified — verifiable at trust.apify.com — and offers a Data Processing Agreement for customers who require formalised data processing terms. Business and Enterprise plan customers also get role-based access controls and detailed audit logs, which are standard requirements for regulated-industry buyers.

For teams scraping data from websites where the underlying data subjects may have GDPR rights, the legal compliance question is not just about the platform's compliance but about the legality of the scraping activity itself. That responsibility sits with the customer rather than with Apify. The platform provides the legal documentation customers need to demonstrate vendor compliance; the use case compliance is on the user.

Who It's Best For

Data engineering teams building production scraping pipelines for market research, price monitoring, lead generation, or competitive intelligence. The combination of marketplace Actors for common targets plus the SDK and Crawlee library for custom needs covers the full range from quick wins to long-term infrastructure.

AI and ML teams assembling training datasets, building RAG systems, or developing agentic applications that need fresh web data. The MCP server, LangChain, and LlamaIndex integrations make Apify the natural data-acquisition layer for AI workflows that go beyond static datasets.

Enterprise teams with EU data residency requirements who need a SOC 2-certified scraping platform with a DPA. Apify is one of the few mature options at this scale that hosts data in the EU and provides formal compliance documentation.

Apify is less suited to non-technical business users looking for a general-purpose no-code automation tool. The pre-built Actors cover many common use cases, but anything beyond that requires Node.js or Python knowledge. Zapier or Make are better choices for connecting SaaS APIs to each other without writing code.

The Verdict

Apify has built a position in European web-data tooling that is genuinely difficult to replicate. The 25,000+ Actor marketplace, the open-source Crawlee library, the SOC 2-certified EU-hosted infrastructure, and the developer payout volume that incentivises a global community to maintain Actors against changing target sites — these are compounding advantages built over a decade. The friction points are real: pricing complexity that frustrates users, residential proxy costs that surprise at scale, and a steep learning curve for non-technical users. For data engineering, AI training, and enterprise scraping use cases where those constraints are manageable, Apify is among the strongest European options in its category and one of the more impressive bootstrapped-to-Series-A stories in Czech tech.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Apify GDPR compliant and where is data hosted?

Apify is GDPR compliant and hosts customer data in the European Union. The company is headquartered in Prague, Czech Republic — an EU member state — and operates under EU data protection law. Apify offers a Data Processing Agreement (DPA) for customers who require one, which is standard for B2B SaaS in regulated industries. The platform is also SOC 2 certified, as documented at trust.apify.com, providing an independent security audit trail that enterprise procurement teams commonly require. Business and Enterprise plan customers also get role-based access controls and detailed audit logs for internal compliance requirements.

What is an Apify Actor and how does the marketplace work?

An Actor is Apify's term for a containerised web scraping or automation program that can be run on demand via the platform. Actors handle proxy rotation, browser fingerprinting, CAPTCHA evasion, and automatic retries internally, so users focus on the target site rather than the infrastructure. The Apify Store marketplace currently lists 25,000+ Actors covering platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Google Maps, and Amazon. Developers can publish their own Actors and earn revenue from usage by other customers — Apify recently disclosed monthly payouts of around $760,000 to Actor developers, making it one of the most active developer monetisation ecosystems in European data tooling.

How does Apify pricing actually work — is it really usage-based?

Apify uses a hybrid subscription-plus-usage model that requires careful attention. Each plan includes a block of prepaid monthly credits (from $5 on Free to $999 on Business) consumed by compute units, proxy bandwidth, storage operations, and data transfer. Compute unit rates vary by plan: $0.20/CU on Free, $0.16/CU on Starter and Scale, and $0.13/CU on Business. When prepaid credits are exhausted, you pay-as-you-go. Complexity comes from proxy costs (residential proxies are priced separately from compute), Store Actor fees (some third-party Actors charge additional usage fees), and multiple storage metering dimensions. For predictable workloads, the Business plan's lower per-CU rate and dedicated account manager help optimise spend.

Can non-developers use Apify without writing code?

Yes, with meaningful limitations. The 25,000+ pre-built Actors in the Apify Store can be configured and run through a point-and-click UI with no coding required — common use cases like scraping LinkedIn profiles, extracting Google Maps reviews, or monitoring competitor pricing have ready-made Actors that accept URL inputs and return structured data. However, when a target site changes its structure, when you need custom data transformations, or when you want to build multi-step pipelines between Actors, coding knowledge in Node.js or Python becomes necessary. Non-technical users get the most value from Apify as a managed execution environment for pre-built Actors rather than a general-purpose no-code automation platform.

How does Apify compare to Zapier for workflow automation?

Apify and Zapier solve adjacent but distinct problems. Zapier is a no-code workflow automation tool that connects APIs of existing SaaS products — ideal for triggering actions between apps like 'when a new HubSpot contact is created, add a row in Google Sheets.' Apify is a web scraping and data extraction platform — ideal for pulling structured data from websites that do not have an API. They are often used together: Apify extracts data from a website, then a Zapier webhook fires to route that data into a CRM, database, or notification system. Apify is the better choice when the data source is a website rather than an API. Zapier has a much simpler learning curve for business users but cannot access websites that require browser rendering or bypass modern anti-scraping measures.