Yes
Free tier
$5 monthly credits, no card required
Report
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.
Depends
DependsThis 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.
Free guide to Apify's true costs — right for recurring scrapers, overkill for one-off exports.
Confidence: Medium
$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
Value for money
3
Pay-per-use praised; some reviewers find it expensive
Ease of use
4
Non-developers report simple, fast extraction
Feature depth
5
70k+ Actors, REST API, SDKs, webhooks, schedules
Support quality
2
Broken-Actor complaints with zero responses reported
Pros
Cons
Gotchas
- highThird-party Actor support often silent: broken Actors get logged, then zero response⁵
- mediumFree $5 credit buys only ~1,250 Google Maps places; heavy jobs burn it fast⁸
- mediumActor prices exclude Apify compute charges, which add cents per run¹
- mediumCheaper rivals exist: Zyte from $0.13 per 1K requests for proxy-heavy scale12
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
Companies that use it
- Groupon⁹
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 public 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.”
“Whether you're scraping websites, automating data collection, or building scalable agents, Apify makes the process incredibly smooth.”
“I am finding so many actors just not working, you log a support Issue and ZERO response from many”
Alternatives
Compare Use Apify with each alternative.
Bright Data
Enterprise proxy-heavy scale and managed data units
Use Apify vs Bright DataFirecrawl
Best when you need LLM-ready Markdown output
Use Apify vs FirecrawlZyte
Cheapest per-request at $0.13 per 1K
Use Apify vs ZyteOctoparse
No-code visual scraping for non-developers
Use Apify vs OctoparseFull 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.
Sources
- Apify Review 2026 — Use Apifyuse-apify.comreview
- Apify Reviews 2026 — Capterracapterra.comreview
- Apify Reviews & Ratings — TrustRadiustrustradius.comreview
- Apify Reviews — GetAppgetapp.comreview
review
- Apify Review — Hack'celerationhackceleration.comreview
- Apify Pricing 2026 — Use Apifyuse-apify.comofficial
- Apify Free Plan — Use Apifyuse-apify.comofficial
official
- Is Web Scraping Legal — Use Apifyuse-apify.comsecurity
- Apify Alternatives — Use Apifyuse-apify.comreview
review
Rate this review
Anonymous. You can change your vote.
Loading votes…
Ask a follow-up
Ask if a use case fits. Answers stay inside this report and its sources.