What is Apify?
Apify is a cloud platform for web scraping and data extraction. Its core concept is the Actor — a packaged, runnable scraper that handles a specific site or task. There are over 1,500 public Actors in the Apify Store, covering major platforms like Google Maps, Amazon, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Booking.com, Indeed, Zillow, and hundreds more. If data exists on a website, there's a good chance an Actor already exists to extract it.
For developers, Apify provides the infrastructure to run headless browsers (Playwright and Puppeteer), manage proxy rotation to avoid blocks, store results, schedule runs, and connect outputs to other tools. For non-developers, pre-built Actors can often be configured and run through the Apify dashboard without writing a line of code.
The platform solves a persistent and annoying problem in data work: websites don't want you scraping them, so they block bots. Apify handles proxy rotation, CAPTCHA-solving services, and browser fingerprinting mitigation so your scraper keeps working without constant maintenance.
Who is it for?
- Growth marketers and sales teams extracting leads from directories, LinkedIn, or review sites
- Researchers and analysts collecting public data at scale without manual copy-pasting
- E-commerce businesses tracking competitor prices, product listings, and inventory
- Developers building data pipelines that feed into dashboards, AI models, or automation workflows
- Agencies offering data collection as a service to clients
Key features
- Apify Store: 1,500+ pre-built Actors for specific websites and tasks — most are free to use
- Custom Actors: build your own scraper in Node.js or Python using Apify's SDK
- Proxy management: residential, datacenter, and Google SERP proxies included in paid plans
- Scheduled runs: run any Actor on a cron schedule (hourly, daily, weekly)
- Datasets and key-value stores: structured storage for scraped results, exportable as JSON/CSV/Excel
- Webhooks and API: trigger Actors from external systems and push results to downstream tools
- Actor monetisation: publish your own Actor and earn from other users running it
Step-by-step setup
- Go to apify.com and create a free account
- Navigate to the Apify Store and search for the site you want to scrape (e.g., "Google Maps", "Amazon product scraper", "LinkedIn company scraper")
- Click on an Actor that matches your need and read its documentation to understand the input parameters
- Click Try for free to open it with a trial run
- Configure the input: typically a URL or a list of search terms, plus options like result limit and output format
- Click Start and wait for the run to complete — small jobs usually finish in under 5 minutes
- Go to the Dataset tab to view and download your results as JSON, CSV, or Excel
- For recurring use, click Schedule to set the Actor to run automatically at a specified interval
- Connect results to other tools via webhook (send to a Slack channel, trigger a Make/Zapier flow, or push to a Google Sheet)
To build a custom Actor, install the Apify CLI, scaffold a new project (apify create), write your Playwright/Puppeteer scraper, and deploy with apify push.
Tips for getting the most out of it
- Always check the Store first. Building a custom scraper takes hours; finding a pre-built Actor takes two minutes. Even if the pre-built Actor isn't perfect, it's a starting point you can fork.
- Test on small result sets before scaling. Run the Actor with a limit of 10–20 results first to make sure the output looks correct. Only scale up once you've validated the structure.
- Use webhooks to close the loop. A scraper that dumps data into a dataset is useful; a scraper that automatically sends that data to a Google Sheet, triggers a Slack notification, or kicks off a Make scenario is 10x more useful. Set up the webhook from day one.
- Respect robots.txt and terms of service. Apify's tools are powerful; use them responsibly. Scraping data for internal analysis is generally defensible; republishing scraped data commercially is not.
- Feed scraped data into Claude for analysis. Raw scraped data is just noise until someone makes sense of it. Paste a dataset into Claude and ask for pattern recognition, lead scoring, or competitive analysis — that's where the real value comes from.
