What is Apify?
Apify is a cloud platform for web scraping, crawling, and browser automation, built around Actors: pre-built or custom programs distributed through a marketplace with thousands of listings. It handles headless-browser automation for JavaScript-heavy pages with Playwright, Puppeteer, or Selenium, and stores results in datasets or key-value stores that export as JSON, CSV, or Excel. It also has residential and datacenter proxies, scheduling, and API, webhook, and MCP access for programmatic or AI-agent use. Its open-source Crawlee library, with 23.7k GitHub stars, is used to build custom Actors in JavaScript/Node.js or Python, though the hosted Apify platform itself is closed-source and not self-hostable.
Our verdict
Apify suits teams that want a managed platform with a large library of ready-made Actors rather than assembling scraping infrastructure from scratch. Crawlee gives developers an open-source path for custom code, but the hosted platform itself is proprietary and not self-hostable. Teams that need full infrastructure control would run Crawlee on their own instead of using the Apify service.
Categories:
No-code scrapers let non-engineers extract data by clicking elements on a page or filling a template, then run the job on a schedule in the cloud. They trade the flexibility of a framework for speed of setup, which suits recurring extraction jobs and teams without a scraping engineer.
