Apify review

What it does

Apify is a cloud platform for building, running, and orchestrating web-scraping and automation programs called Actors, with a large marketplace of ready-made Actors and an API for integrating results into other systems.

Pricing

The Free plan costs $0 and includes $5 of monthly platform usage. Paid plans, checked 2026-07-30, are Starter at $29 per month, Scale at $199 per month, and Business at $999 per month, each carrying a matching platform-usage allowance. Annual billing saves 10%. Compute is billed in compute units, where 1,024 MB of memory running for one hour equals one compute unit.

Limits that bite

Unused usage credits do not roll over — they expire at the end of the billing cycle. On the Free plan, only the 10 most recent runs are retained, and only for four months. Tabular exports (CSV, XLSX) are capped at 2,000 columns. Concurrent runs are limited by plan, from 25 on Free to 256 on Business.

How it compares

PhantomBuster favors no-code recipes over Apify's code-first Actors. Bright Data centers on proxy networks and unblocking. Zyte suits teams standardized on the Scrapy framework. Apify documents SOC 2 Type II compliance.

Good fit / poor fit

A good fit for developers who need programmable, scalable scraping with an API and audited security. A poor fit for non-technical users wanting point-and-click automation, or for workloads needing long-term run retention on the free tier.