Apify
Shares rank 3 of 4 web scraping APIs by recommenders
People recommend Apify as a marketplace of over 8,000 ready-made tools called Actors for extracting web data and automating web tasks.
People recommend Apify as a marketplace of over 8,000 ready-made tools called Actors for extracting web data and automating web tasks.
5 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 5
- criticize it
- 0
- approval share
- 100%
Recommended in 3 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 5 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- Nobody criticizes itNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 3 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, not met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Marketplace of 8,000+ ready-made Actors
“We're running a marketplace of 8,000+ tools called Actors for all kinds of web data extraction and automation use cases”
Comment from 3 Nov 2025 in “The Apify $1M Challenge for building new useful cloud Actors” Useful for specialized or unique data
“I can understand something like Apify + Exa where you need specialized/unique data”
Comment from 17 Aug 2026 in “Show HN: OpenWebSearch – A router for web search indexes” Good for scraping Google ranked pages
“Apify is great for getting google ranked pages”
Comment from 17 Aug 2026 in “Show HN: OpenWebSearch – A router for web search indexes” Large pool of residential IPs
“try services like Bright Data or Apify that have a ton of residential IPs”
Comment from 5 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: Onlyrecipe 2.0 – I added all features HN requested – 4 years later”
Other web scraping APIs people recommend
The three most recommended other web scraping APIs, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Firecrawl | 17 | 10 | 63% | 10 | — | — |
| Bright Data | 10 | 32 | 24% | 5 | — | — |
| ApifyThis page | 5 | 0 | 100% | 3 | — | — |
| Jina Reader | 5 | 1 | 83% | 3 | — | — |
What people said
4 of the 5 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Apify is great for getting google ranked pages”
“I can understand something like Apify + Exa where you need specialized/unique data”
“try services like Bright Data or Apify that have a ton of residential IPs”
“We're running a marketplace of 8,000+ tools called Actors for all kinds of web data extraction and automation use cases”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.