When Apify fits
A recurring or site-specific collection job that benefits from an existing Actor or a custom hosted scraper.
Check before integrating
Apify is a platform, not one universal page-extraction schema. Actor fees, compute, proxy use and output quality must be checked for the particular Actor.
Provider endpoint reference
This is Apify's documented interface. Its credentials and response format are separate from an All Them APIs account.
POST https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/{actorId}/runs
Authentication: Bearer API token
Inputs: Actor-specific JSON input, authenticated with a token
Output: Run metadata; retrieve finished output from the run's dataset or use an appropriate synchronous endpoint.| Capability | What to expect |
|---|---|
| Primary workflow | Hosted Actor runs and datasets |
| Returned content | Actor-defined records or files |
| Rendering/control | Actor implementation determines browser behavior |
| Job model | Run creation, status and dataset retrieval |
| Integration boundary | Pin Actor identity, version and input schema |
| Cost driver | Actor charges, compute, storage and proxy usage |
Pricing model and production access
Platform usage plus Actor-specific pricing. Plans include platform spend; individual Actors can use compute, per-result or other pricing. Do not infer total job cost from the platform's compute-unit rate alone.
For 1,000 accepted pages, record attempted URLs, render mode, retries and schema failures. A low HTML-request price can require separate parsing; an extraction credit can include work that another vendor bills separately. Do not rank cost until the output passes the same acceptance check.
Migration notes
Pin an Actor and its schema/version in the adapter. Wait for terminal run status, then validate dataset items; the run-creation response is not the scraped data.
Keep provider-specific authentication and response mapping inside an adapter. Preserve source timestamps and identifiers so changing a provider does not silently change the meaning of stored records.
Apify alternatives
| Alternative | When to evaluate it |
|---|---|
| Apify vs Firecrawl | An agent or retrieval pipeline that wants main-content documents without building a separate HTML-to-Markdown stage. |
| Apify vs Bright Data | An authorized retrieval workload needing an explicit zone configuration and a clear boundary between page access and structured platform-specific extraction. |
| Apify vs ScrapingBee | A team that wants to start with page retrieval and add explicit wait conditions or selector-based extraction. |
| Apify vs ScraperAPI | An existing HTTP collection pipeline that wants managed page retrieval while retaining its own parsing and validation. |
| Apify vs Zyte API | A collector that needs to choose between raw HTTP retrieval, rendered content and structured extraction while retaining request-level controls. |
A fair evaluation
- Build an authorized test set spanning static HTML, JavaScript-rendered pages, tables and long articles. Save expected fields and the permitted access conditions.
- Use the same URLs, country, device settings and freshness window. Keep cache hits separate from fresh fetches.
- Mark challenge pages, empty main content and invalid structured fields as failures even if the HTTP status is 200.
- Measure time to a usable document or completed dataset, not only time to job creation. Include polling, retries and client-side parsing.
- Report total billed credits, browser time, proxy charges and actor fees per accepted document. Respect site terms, privacy, robots guidance and access controls; do not test bypassing protected accounts.
A common integration contract
POST /api/v1/web-scraping/extractReview the request contract and tell us the coverage you need. Access requires enablement; this endpoint does not execute or bill requests yet.
View endpoint and request accessSources and review dates
Documentation reviewed October 28, 2026. These are integration and plan comparisons, not measured speed or accuracy rankings. Availability, licensing and prices should be confirmed for the chosen plan.
Corrections: email faizank@docsalot.dev with an official source.