Apify Review 2026: Web Data Without Coding, Pricing and Limits

Last updated on October 11, 2026

You want to know what your competitors charge for the same product. Or you need the reviews for 200 items on Amazon, a list of every physiotherapy practice in Manchester, or the prices of a supplier who offers no export. The data is public, but collecting it by hand is still a grind.

Your own scripts only help until the target site changes its layout or blocks your IP. That is where Apify comes in: ready-made scrapers for almost every major website, maintained by the vendor or the community, plus proxies, schedules and connections to Make, Zapier, n8n and Google Sheets.

We looked at what the platform does for online sellers, what a run really costs, where EU merchants need to pay attention to data protection and which alternatives are worth a look. We checked every price directly with Apify on 11 October 2026.

What is Apify?

Apify is a cloud platform from Prague that runs small programs which visit websites and store the data they find in a structured way. Apify calls these programs Actors: each Actor takes an input, such as “accountants in Hamburg” or a list of Amazon product pages, does its job in the cloud and returns a table. You can download the result as Excel, CSV, JSON or XML, or pass it straight on to another tool.

The heart of the platform is the Apify Store. According to the vendor it holds more than 84,000 ready-made Actors, sorted into categories such as e-commerce, lead generation, social media or SEO. Apify maintains the best-known ones itself, the rest come from external developers who earn a share every time their Actor is used. For Google Maps, Amazon, Instagram, TikTok, eBay, Etsy or Google Shopping there are several variants each.

If you can code, you build your own Actors with the open-source framework Crawlee and the JavaScript and Python libraries. Most sellers never need to: open an Actor in the Store, enter a search term and a result limit, start. The company, Apify Technologies s.r.o., was founded in 2015 by Jan Čurn and Jakub Balada, went through the Y Combinator program and employs its team in the Czech Republic. The platform is SOC 2 Type II certified.

What Apify does for online sellers

Apify describes the e-commerce category of its Store as tools for pulling product data from online shops, for competitor analysis, dynamic pricing, reporting or dropshipping. In practice, most seller use cases come down to four jobs.

Monitoring competitor prices. Apify’s E-commerce Scraping Tool reads product details from Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, Zalando, Otto, Etsy and, according to the vendor, practically any shop built on Shopify, WooCommerce or Magento. You get back price, currency, SKU or EAN, stock, rating and seller. Apify’s own blog describes a setup in which this Actor runs every hour, writes the prices into a Google Sheet via Make and adjusts your own Shopify price when a competitor drops below a threshold.

Product data and reviews from Amazon. The Amazon Product Scraper returns ASIN, price, list price, rating, availability and bestseller rank, for every Amazon marketplace. The Amazon Reviews Scraper collects reviews with stars, text and reactions. Both are useful for product research before you list something yourself, or for analysing the criticism of competing products.

Lead lists from Google Maps. The Google Maps Scraper is the most used Actor on the platform, with more than 640,000 users. It returns business names, addresses, phone numbers, websites and ratings for a search such as “bike shops in Munich”. For B2B sellers who want to approach retailers or resellers, it is the fastest route to a first list. To verify email addresses afterwards, a tool like Hunter.io fits well.

Watching social media and the market. Instagram, TikTok and Facebook scrapers collect posts, hashtags and comments, for example to see which products are taking off in your niche right now. Apify also lists competitor ad analysis and TikTok Shop sales data as use cases.

Prices and user numbers read from the Apify Store on 11 October 2026. “From” means: the price applies on the Starter plan; it is partly higher on the free plan and lower on larger plans.

Who Apify is for, and who it is not for

Apify pays off when you need the same data again and again: competitor prices every week, new reviews every day, an updated retailer list every month. Then the learning effort is justified, and the schedule does the rest. If you already work with Make, Zapier or n8n, Apify gives you a data source that slots cleanly into existing workflows. For AI workflows there is a dedicated MCP server through which Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor can start Actors directly; our NovaMira review shows what the same idea looks like for WordPress agents.

Apify makes less sense if you need 50 records once. A browser extension or half an hour of manual work is faster. And if you have never filtered a spreadsheet, the interface will feel foreign: the Actor settings use technical names, and the documentation is written for developers. If you plan to collect personal data at scale, read the section on data protection first.

What Apify costs

Billing has three building blocks, and you should understand them before your first large run. First, the platform plan, which includes a monthly usage allowance. Second, compute time, billed in compute units: one unit equals 1 GB of memory for one hour and costs $0.20 on the free and Starter plans. Third, the price of the Actor, set by its developer, usually per 1,000 results.

All prices are in US dollars excluding tax, as of 11 October 2026; Apify takes 10 percent off for yearly payment. Unused allowance expires at the end of the billing period. Residential proxies, which use the IP addresses of private connections and get blocked less often, cost an extra $8 per gigabyte on the smaller plans. Students and start-ups get 30 percent off Starter and Scale respectively.

A worked example. You monitor 300 competitor products every day with the E-commerce Scraping Tool. That is 9,000 product details a month, from $1.00 per 1,000 according to the Store, so around $9 for the Actor. Add compute time, which comes to a few cents per run depending on the site. The Starter plan covers that comfortably, the free plan barely. With 50,000 Amazon products a month the picture changes: $150 for the Actor plus compute time plus possibly residential proxies if Amazon blocks you. That jump is exactly what users describe in reviews as hard to budget for.

Important since October 2026: the old rental model, under which individual Actors cost a fixed monthly fee, was retired by Apify on 1 October 2026. Every Actor now bills either per usage or per event, meaning per result or per start. Developers must announce price increases for their Actors 14 days in advance. You can set a cost cap for every run, and that is the single most important lever against surprises.

Our test: a business list in ten minutes

For the hands-on test we ran the Google Maps Scraper with the search “Steuerberater in Hamburg” (tax advisers in Hamburg) and a cap of 200 results. Setup took two minutes: enter the search term, set the language, set the maximum, start. A few minutes later we had a table with business names, addresses, phone numbers, websites and Google ratings, ready to export to Excel. The data quality was usable straight away; by hand the list would have taken hours. According to the Store price, a run like this with 200 places costs around 30 cents plus compute time.

Two things stood out. The settings forms offer dozens of options for every Actor, most of which a beginner can ignore, but you only know which ones after some reading. And Actor quality varies: the ones Apify maintains itself run reliably, while for community Actors with few users it is worth checking the rating, user count and last update date before you build a schedule on them.

Getting the data where you work: Make, Zapier, n8n, Google Sheets

A scraping result is only worth something once it lands where you actually work. Apify offers official integrations with Make, Zapier, n8n and Gumloop, plus webhooks, a REST API with libraries for JavaScript and Python, and connectors for Airtable, Google Drive, HubSpot and Snowflake. Data reaches Google Sheets either via Make or via a dedicated “Google Sheets Import & Export” Actor from the Store. Schedules run on cron expressions or shorthand such as “daily”, with time zone and daylight saving handled for you.

For AI applications Apify provides an MCP server and documents integrations with LangChain, the OpenAI Agents SDK and Pinecone. That lets an AI agent decide for itself which Actor to start for a given question. For a small store this is still a toy today; for agencies and data teams it is becoming standard.

Data protection and legal: what EU merchants need to check

Apify makes scraping technically possible, the legal responsibility stays with you. The terms of service put it plainly: the customer is solely responsible for the legality, accuracy and use of all data processed through the platform. For personal data the GDPR applies regardless of where the data came from, as Apify itself writes in its article on the legal situation. A list of business addresses from Google Maps is a different matter from a list of private Instagram profiles.

Three points we consider important for the assessment:

• Data location. Apify is based in the EU, but according to the vendor’s security whitepaper the core systems run on AWS in the Northern Virginia region, USA. The architecture documentation confirms a single AWS region without naming it. Apify covers the transfer with the EU standard contractual clauses. We could not find an EU hosting option. If you process personal data, you need to record this in your register of processing activities and sign a data processing agreement, which Apify provides as a Data Processing Addendum.
• Copyright and database rights. Reading publicly accessible data is, according to Apify, generally permitted, but not every form of it. Website operators in the EU can opt out of commercial text and data mining, usually in machine-readable form via robots.txt. Ignoring that reservation puts you on thin ice.
• Terms of the target site. Amazon, Instagram and many marketplaces prohibit automated extraction in their terms. Apify points out that such clauses bite mainly when you have actively agreed to them at registration. For a seller, a suspended seller account would cost more than any cease-and-desist letter.

Our recommendation for sellers: product and price data without personal references is the uncritical part. For contact data, apply data minimisation, so collect only what you really need and do not keep the lists forever. If in doubt, ask your lawyer before the first large run; Apify says the same in its own blog.

What users say about Apify

The reviews are unusually consistent. On Trustpilot, Apify stands at 4.8 out of 5 from 785 reviews, 90 percent of them five stars, with 510 reviews added in the last twelve months. On G2 the score is 4.7 out of 5, on Product Hunt 5.0 from twelve votes. The praise is always the same: the choice of ready-made Actors, the quick start and stable scheduled runs.

The criticism is almost entirely about money. “The one downside is cost”, writes one Trustpilot user; another asks for more transparency because the platform suggested a more expensive scraper without being asked. Add the learning curve for non-developers and the varying quality of community Actors, which can silently stop working after the target site changes its layout. Trustpilot also notes that Apify does not reply to negative reviews. All figures as of 11 October 2026.

Apify compared with alternatives

For this table we checked the vendors’ pricing pages on 11 October 2026 and included only what is stated there. The pricing bases differ a lot, so we compare the model rather than a single monthly price.

In short: if you refuse to write a line of code and need fixed monthly costs, Octoparse or Browse AI serve you better. If you run your own scrapers and only want to get rid of the blocking, take ScrapingBee, Zyte or Bright Data. Apify sits in between and is the only one of these platforms with a real marketplace where a finished tool already exists for almost every website.

What to check before you decide

• Check the data source: is there an Actor in the Store from Apify itself, or one with many users and recent maintenance, for your target site?
• Set a cost cap: enter a limit per run before your first large job and watch the free plan’s bill for a week.
• Clarify personal data: business data yes, private profiles only with a legal basis and data minimisation. Sign the data processing agreement with Apify if personal data flows.
• Decide where the data goes: Google Sheets, a Make scenario or a Shopify pricing rule. Without further processing it remains a table nobody reads.
• Know the support levels: the free plan comes with community support only, chat starts with Starter, and there is no phone support on any plan.

Our verdict on Apify

For online sellers, Apify is the most versatile source of web data we know, and for product and price data also the least complicated: pick an Actor, set the input, export the result. The free plan is enough to try it on a real case. The 4.0 rating reflects the deductions: costs that are hard to predict at volume, an interface for people who are comfortable with spreadsheets, and data on US servers. If you know that and use the cost cap, you get a tool that turns competitor monitoring from a weekly chore into a schedule.

More tools that take routine work off your plate are in our Automation category. If you want to enrich scraped lead lists with contact details, read our Clay review; if you want to connect Apify to the rest of your stack, our Make.com review explains the basics.

Frequently asked questions about Apify