Company Overview
Apify was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in Prague, Czech Republic, by Jakub Balada, Jan Čurn, Ondřej Urban, and Jan Hovad. Apify is a leading web scraping and automation platform, offering end-to-end solutions from data extraction to browser automation. Developers can quickly build, deploy, and run web crawlers on the Apify platform, or use over 1,000 pre-built Actors (ready-made scrapers) from the Apify Store, dramatically reducing the barrier to data acquisition.
Apify open-sourced its core crawling framework Crawlee on GitHub, which has an active developer community. The platform also provides proxy services (Apify Proxy), task scheduling, Webhook integration, and other supporting tools, widely used in e-commerce price monitoring, market research, sentiment analysis, real estate data collection, and more.
Related providers: Apify Automation Services
Core Products
| Product | Description |
|---|---|
| Apify Web Scraping Platform | Core platform for building, deploying, and running web crawlers and automation tasks |
| Apify Store | 1,000+ pre-built Actors (ready-made scrapers) covering e-commerce, social media, news, real estate, and more |
| Apify Crawlee | Open-source web scraping SDK supporting JavaScript/TypeScript and Python with built-in anti-detection |
| Apify API | RESTful API for programmatically managing crawlers, extracting data, and triggering tasks |
| Apify Proxy | Residential and datacenter proxies with IP rotation and geo-targeting to avoid blocking |
| Apify Scheduler | Task scheduler for running crawlers on a recurring schedule |
| Apify Webhooks | Event-driven webhook notifications for triggering downstream processes after task completion |
| Apify Browser Automation | Headless browser automation powered by Puppeteer and Playwright |
Core Strengths
Rich Actor Ecosystem: Apify Store offers 1,000+ pre-built scrapers for extracting data from popular websites without coding
Open-Source Crawlee: Actively maintained on GitHub with anti-detection and bypass strategies
Flexible Proxy Network: Both residential and datacenter proxies with country/city-level targeting
Full-Stack Automation: End-to-end solution from data extraction to processing, storage, and export
Developer-Friendly: Complete API, SDK, and Webhook support for easy integration with existing workflows
Product Comparison
| Category | Apify | Scrapinghub (Scrapy Cloud) | Zyte | Bright Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-built Scraper Store | ✅ 1,000+ Actors | ❌ Limited | ❌ Limited | ❌ None |
| Open-Source Framework | ✅ Crawlee | ✅ Scrapy | ✅ Scrapy | ❌ None |
| Proxy Types | Residential + Datacenter | Residential + Datacenter | Residential | Residential + Datacenter + ISP |
| No-Code Support | ✅ Yes | ❌ No | ❌ No | ❌ No |
| Cloud Runtime | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes | ❌ No | ❌ No |
Key Milestones
- 2015: Founded in Prague by Jakub Balada, Jan Čurn, Ondřej Urban, and Jan Hovad
- 2016: Launched Apify Store, opening the Actor ecosystem for community contributions
- 2018: Released Apify Proxy with residential and datacenter proxy support
- 2020: Open-sourced Crawlee framework, gaining widespread GitHub community traction
- 2022: Introduced Apify Scheduler and Webhooks, completing the automation workflow
- Present: Continuously optimizing the platform, serving over 1 million developers worldwide
Market Position
Apify's main competitors in the web scraping and automation market include:
- Scrapinghub (Scrapy Cloud): Core operator of the Scrapy ecosystem, direct competitor in developer market
- Zyte (formerly Scrapinghub): Similar data collection API and proxy services
- Octoparse: Desktop visual scraper targeting non-technical users
- ParseHub: Visual web data extraction tool suitable for beginners
- Bright Data: World's largest proxy network provider with web scraping API offerings
- Diffbot: AI-powered web data extraction engine focused on structured data
- Browserless: Browser automation API service
