Compare Apify vs. Scrapy

Apify provides the infrastructure developers need to build, deploy, and monetize web automation tools. The platform centers on Apify Store, a marketplace featuring 10,000+ community-built Actors. These are serverless programs that scrape websites, automate browser tasks, and power AI agents. Developers create Actors using JavaScript, Python, or Crawlee (Apify's open-source crawling library), then publish them to the Store. When other users run your Actor, you earn money. Apify manages the infrastructure, handles payments, and processes monthly payouts to thousands of active developers. Apify Store offers ready-to-use solutions for common use cases: extracting data from Amazon, Google Maps, and social platforms; monitoring prices; generating leads; and much more. Under the hood, Actors automatically manage proxy rotation, CAPTCHA solving, JavaScript-heavy pages, and headless browser orchestration. The platform scales on demand with 99.95% uptime and maintains SOC2, GDPR, and CCPA compliance. For workflow automation, Apify connects to Zapier, Make, n8n, and LangChain. The platform also offers an MCP server, enabling AI assistants like Claude to discover and invoke Actors programmatically.

Scrapy is a high-level framework designed for fast web crawling and scraping, enabling users to navigate websites and retrieve structured data from their content. It serves a variety of applications, including data mining, web monitoring, and automated testing. The framework comes equipped with advanced tools for selecting and extracting information from HTML and XML documents, utilizing enhanced CSS selectors and XPath expressions, as well as providing convenient methods for regular expression extraction. Additionally, it supports generating feed exports in various formats such as JSON, CSV, and XML, with the capability to store these outputs in diverse backends including FTP, S3, and local file systems. Scrapy also features robust encoding support that automatically detects and handles foreign, non-standard, and broken encoding declarations, ensuring reliable data processing. Overall, this versatility makes Scrapy a powerful tool for developers and data analysts alike.