Apify API
Provides a cloud platform for web scraping and browser automation via a marketplace of 1,500+ ready-made Actors (containerized scrapers) plus a REST API and SDK for running, managing, and scheduling them.
Score Breakdown
⚙ Agent Friendliness
🔒 Security
Actor input can contain credentials passed as key-value store secrets rather than plain input fields; use this pattern to avoid exposing credentials in run logs. No scope granularity on API tokens.
⚡ Reliability
Best When
Your agent needs to scrape a wide variety of websites without building and maintaining custom scrapers, and can tolerate Actor startup latency in exchange for breadth and reliability.
Avoid When
You need real-time scraping with under one second total latency or require a fully self-hosted scraping infrastructure.
Use Cases
- • Extract structured data from any website by selecting a pre-built Actor from the marketplace rather than writing a scraper from scratch
- • Run agent-triggered web crawls on demand via the REST API and retrieve results from the dataset storage
- • Schedule recurring data collection jobs (e.g., price monitoring, news feeds) and push results to agent pipelines
- • Build and publish custom scrapers as Actors that other agents or team members can invoke via API
- • Collect social media, e-commerce, or search engine data at scale using platform-managed browser pools and proxies
Not For
- • Real-time sub-second data extraction where Actor startup overhead (5-30s) is unacceptable
- • Simple single-URL scraping tasks where spinning up a full Actor is more overhead than writing a direct fetch call
- • Teams with strict data residency requirements that cannot use US/EU cloud infrastructure
Interface
Authentication
Personal API token passed as Authorization: Bearer header or token query parameter. Organization tokens available for team use. No granular scope system; token grants full account access.
Pricing
Credits cover Actor compute time, proxy bandwidth, and storage. Some marketplace Actors are free; others charge additional rental fees on top of compute credits.
Agent Metadata
Known Gotchas
- ⚠ Actor startup time (5-30 seconds) is paid compute time even if the Actor fails immediately; always validate Actor ID and input schema before triggering a run
- ⚠ Dataset items are append-only and persist after run completion; agents must explicitly clean up or paginate through results — forgetting to paginate truncates large result sets silently
- ⚠ The 'Run Actor synchronously' endpoint has a hard 300-second timeout; long-running Actors must use async run + polling or webhooks to avoid timeout errors
- ⚠ Marketplace Actors are maintained by third parties and may break or change behavior without notice; pin to specific Actor versions using the version query parameter in production
- ⚠ Proxy usage costs accumulate quickly for crawls that hit many pages; always set maxRequestsPerCrawl or equivalent limits in Actor input to prevent runaway credit consumption
Alternatives
Full Evaluation Report
Detailed scoring breakdown, competitive positioning, security analysis, and improvement recommendations for Apify API.
Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-06.