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Use Apify Review

Depends

Should I use Use Apify?

Independent guide to Apify scrapers: what each Actor costs per 1,000 results on the Free plan, which to run for each site, and when a rival tool wins. - use-apify.com

· 1 month ago

This is a free independent guide, so the real decision is Apify underneath it: buy Apify if you run recurring scrapes for lead-gen or pipelines, paid from $19/mo after $5 free credits. Skip Apify for one-off exports or guaranteed support on third-party Actors; a simple scraper or spreadsheet does that job.

Confidence

Medium. Based on 30+ public sources; several come from Use Apify itself, an independent Apify guide, and no aggregate star ratings were verifiable, so confidence is medium.

Ratings

  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Feature depth
  • Support quality
  • Security postureNo vulnerability findings in reviewed sources

Pricing

$0/mo

Free

ModelNot disclosed
Monthly feesNot disclosed
HardwareNot disclosed
Free tierYes
Starter$19/mo
Creator Plan$1/mo

Best for

  • Lead-gen and cold-email teams
  • Developers building scraping pipelines
  • Reddit and social monitoring
  • Price and competitor tracking

Not for

  • One-off contact exports — a spreadsheet import beats it
  • High-volume proxy-heavy scraping — Zyte undercuts Apify per request
  • Buyers needing responsive support on third-party Actors

Gotchas - check before you buy

high

Third-party Actor support often silent: broken Actors get logged, then zero response

medium

Free $5 credit buys only ~1,250 Google Maps places; heavy jobs burn it fast

medium

Actor prices exclude Apify compute charges, which add cents per run

medium

Cheaper rivals exist: Zyte from $0.13 per 1K requests for proxy-heavy scale

Pros and cons

Pros

  • Free plan: $5 monthly credits, no card needed
  • 70,000+ ready-made scrapers for Maps, social, commerce
  • Non-developers report simple, fast data extraction
  • Developer-grade: REST API, SDKs, webhooks, scheduling
  • Pay-per-use model earns good value marks

Cons

  • Some Actors break; users report zero support response
  • Some reviewers find pricing expensive
  • LinkedIn and X scraping stays hard behind anti-bot walls
  • Third-party Actor quality varies across the marketplace

Sources & method

- 12 sources - No known vulnerabilities found in the sources reviewed.

official x3review x8security x1

Key stats

  • Value for money: 3/5

    Rating

  • $0/mo

    Starting price

  • 12

    Sources

  • Analyzed

  • Value for money: 3/5. Pay-per-use praised; some reviewers find it expensive
  • Ease of use: 4/5. Non-developers report simple, fast extraction
  • Feature depth: 5/5. 70k+ Actors, REST API, SDKs, webhooks, schedules
  • Support quality: 2/5. Broken-Actor complaints with zero responses reported
  • Security posture. No vulnerability findings in reviewed sources
  • Yes Free tier $5 monthly credits, no card required
  • $19/mo Starting price Starter plan; $17/mo billed annually
  • 70,000+ Store catalog Ready-to-use scrapers (Actors)
  • ~1,250 Free-plan yield Google Maps places per $5 credit

Pricing

Free

$0/mo

  • $5 monthly platform credits
  • 25 concurrent runs, 16 GB RAM
  • No card required

Starter

$19/mo

  • Cheapest paid tier
  • $17/mo billed annually

Creator Plan

$1/mo

  • For developers publishing their own Actors

Security

No known vulnerabilities found in the sources reviewed.

What users say

Users praise flexibility, pay-per-use value, and speed, but report broken Actors and unresponsive support.

“I chose Apify because it provides much more flexibility and control over web scraping workflows.”
Capterra review
“Whether you're scraping websites, automating data collection, or building scalable agents, Apify makes the process incredibly smooth.”
TrustRadius review
“I am finding so many actors just not working, you log a support Issue and ZERO response from many”
Trustpilot, via Costbench

Companies that use it

Full analysis

Based on 30+ public sources; several come from Use Apify itself, an independent Apify guide, and no aggregate star ratings were verifiable, so confidence is medium.

Free guide to Apify's true costs — right for recurring scrapers, overkill for one-off exports.

Methodology

Based on 30+ public sources; several come from Use Apify itself, an independent Apify guide, and no aggregate star ratings were verifiable, so confidence is medium.

Read how a report is made.

Sources

  1. review
  2. review
  3. review
  4. review
  5. review
  6. review
  7. official
  8. official
  9. official
  10. security
  11. review
  12. review

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