Master Apify with our step-by-step tutorial, detailed feature walkthrough, and expert tips.
Sign up for a free Apify account at the Apify console to receive $5 in monthly platform credits for testing and prototyping. Browse the Actor marketplace to find pre
built scrapers for your target websites — popular Actors include web scrapers for Google, Amazon, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Configure your chosen Actor with target URLs, selectors, and output settings using the visual input editor, then review the Actor's documentation for advanced options. Run your first Actor and download results in JSON, CSV, or Excel format from the dataset storage — inspect the output to verify data quality and completeness. Set up webhooks or API integration to automate data collection on a schedule and deliver results directly to your database, Google Sheets, or application via the REST API.
💡 Quick Start: Follow these 2 steps in order to get up and running with Apify quickly.
Explore the key features that make Apify powerful for web data workflows.
Apify charges based on compute units (CUs), which measure the computing resources your Actors consume. One CU equals 1 GB of memory used for 1 hour. Each pricing tier includes a monthly credit allocation (e.g., $5 on Free, $29 on Starter) that covers a set amount of CUs. If you exceed your included credits, additional usage is billed at pay-as-you-go rates. Browser-based Actors use more CUs than lightweight HTTP scrapers, so costs vary by workload type.
You can absolutely build custom Actors using Apify's SDK, which supports both Python and Node.js. The SDK provides built-in utilities for proxy management, request queuing, data storage, and error handling. You can develop locally, test with the Apify CLI, and deploy to the cloud platform. Custom Actors can also be published to the marketplace for others to use, either free or as paid offerings.
Apify provides multiple layers of anti-detection: automatic proxy rotation across datacenter and residential IP pools, browser fingerprint randomization, request throttling, and session management. The platform handles CAPTCHAs through integrated solving services and supports headless browser rendering for JavaScript-heavy sites. For particularly challenging targets, you can configure custom headers, cookies, and user agents. However, for the most heavily protected sites, specialized anti-bot providers may offer more advanced evasion.
Apify offers several integration paths for AI workflows. The native LangChain integration lets you use Actors as data loaders in RAG pipelines. The Website Content Crawler outputs clean Markdown optimized for LLM consumption and vector database ingestion. You can also use the Python SDK to pull scraped data directly into Jupyter notebooks, pandas DataFrames, or ML training pipelines. Webhook triggers enable automated workflows where new scraped data automatically feeds into your AI processing pipeline.
When a target website updates its structure, affected Actors in the marketplace are typically updated by their maintainers, though response times vary. For popular Actors maintained by the Apify team, fixes are usually deployed within days. Community-maintained Actors may take longer. You can set up monitoring alerts to detect when an Actor's output quality drops. For critical workflows, consider building custom Actors with resilient selectors, or using Apify's AI-powered content extraction that adapts to layout changes more gracefully than CSS-selector-based approaches.
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Tutorial updated March 2026