The Apify web scraping, data extraction, and automation platform

What do you like best about the product?

Apify makes it incredibly easy to scale our web scraping operations. Their built-in proxy rotation is highly reliable and handles IP bans flawlessly. It has saved our team countless hours that we would have otherwise spent managing custom scraping infrastructure, allowing us to focus on extracting and analyzing the data rather than dealing with request blocks.

What do you dislike about the product?

The learning curve can be a bit steep for absolute beginners. While the pre-built Actors are extremely helpful for standard use cases, building a custom scraper from scratch requires a solid understanding of Node.js or Python, which might be a bit challenging if you don't have a technical background.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We use Apify to automate our market research and competitor price tracking. Before Apify, we struggled with building robust scrapers that would break frequently due to website structure changes or IP blocks. Apify's reliable platform, scheduling features, and proxy management resolved these issues, reducing our scraper maintenance time by 80% and allowing us to gather clean, structured data on a daily schedule.

What do you like best about the product?

What I like best about Apify is the overall developer experience. The platform has excellent documentation, a very good CLI, strong MCP support, and a huge ecosystem of ready-made Actors and integrations. It makes building scraping and automation workflows much faster compared to doing everything manually.

I also like how easy it is to experiment and build creative projects on Apify. The platform is flexible enough for both simple monitoring tasks and larger automation workflows. On top of that, the community and developer events around Apify are very active and helpful.

What do you dislike about the product?

One thing I dislike about Apify is the way Actor earnings and negative balances are handled for developers. Sometimes if one Actor goes into negative profit, it can affect overall earnings for a long time before adjustments are processed. I would prefer a shorter settlement cycle, like weekly instead of monthly.

Another issue is that some community Actors can vary in quality and reliability, so it occasionally takes time to find the best solution for a specific use case. Better discovery and quality ranking for Actors would improve the experience further.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Apify helps us solve the problem of collecting and monitoring public feedback from many platforms in one automated workflow. We use it to track discussions, reviews, complaints, and sentiment from Reddit, Google Reviews, X (Twitter), Quora, Instagram, Threads, and Glassdoor.

Without Apify, this work would require a lot of manual searching and monitoring every day. With automation, we can find customer feedback faster, monitor competitor products more efficiently, and identify product issues earlier. This saves time, improves visibility into customer sentiment, and helps us make better product decisions.

What do you like best about the product?

The Apify Store is a game-changer — thousands of ready-made actors mean I rarely have to build scrapers from scratch. The API integrates seamlessly into my n8n automation workflows, and the new MCP server support lets AI agents access scraping tools directly, which saves hours of manual work every week. Performance on large crawling jobs is consistently solid, and the documentation is thorough enough that onboarding is straightforward even for complex use cases. The AI/intelligence direction Apify is heading — especially with the MCP integration — makes it one of the most forward-thinking platforms in the automation space.

What do you dislike about the product?

The pricing model can become costly quickly once you scale up — compute unit consumption adds up faster than expected, and there's no very affordable middle tier between the free plan and the paid options. This makes it harder to justify for smaller projects or budget-conscious teams. The UI could also be more intuitive; navigating between actors, runs, storage, and settings feels a bit fragmented at times, especially for new users. A cleaner dashboard overview and more granular cost monitoring per workflow would go a long way in improving the overall experience.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Before using Apify, collecting data from websites required building and maintaining custom scrapers from scratch — time-consuming and fragile. Apify solves this by providing a reliable infrastructure for web scraping and browser automation that I can plug directly into my existing workflows. I integrate Apify via API into n8n to automate data collection pipelines that previously took hours of manual work. The MCP server integration is a particular game-changer: my AI agents can now trigger scraping tasks autonomously, extracting structured data from social media, e-commerce sites, and search engines in real time. This has reduced data collection time by a significant margin and allowed me to scale automation projects that simply weren't feasible before.

What do you like best about the product?

What I like best about Apify is how easy it makes scaling and managing scraping workflows. The platform handles infrastructure, proxies, scheduling, and reliability really well, so we can focus on building products instead of maintaining scrapers. The developer experience is also excellent — fast to build, deploy, and iterate.

What do you dislike about the product?

The main downside is that the dashboard can become a bit cluttered when managing many actors and runs at scale.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Apify solves the complexity of building and maintaining reliable web scraping infrastructure — things like proxy rotation, scaling, scheduling, retries, and deployment.

For us, that translates into faster development cycles, lower operational overhead, and more stable data pipelines. Instead of spending time on infrastructure and scraping edge cases, we can focus on using the data for product features, analytics, and automation. It has also made it much easier to scale data collection without increasing engineering effort proportionally.

What do you like best about the product?

Great dashboard for seeing the results of API requests and covers all of the scraping issues you'd face if you implemented it from scratch. Nice to have a competitive market and for it to be priced per result. Huge variety of prebuilt scrapers and the SDK to add your own works well.

What do you dislike about the product?

Some scrapers are not as well maintained as they could be. Would like to see bulk pricing for when requests grow to a large number and more Apify maintained scrapers as a sign of quality.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Scraping infrastructure to save rebuilding this internally for our team. We can rely on their code and monitor the results in a dashboard, with team permissions and transparent pricing