Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Apify VS ArchiveBox

Compare Apify VS ArchiveBox and see what are their differences

Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.

Apify logo Apify

Apify is a web scraping and automation platform that can turn any website into an API.

ArchiveBox logo ArchiveBox

The open-source, self-hosted internet archiving solution
  • Apify Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-30

Apify is a JavaScript & Node.js based data extraction tool for websites that crawls lists of URLs and automates workflows on the web. With Apify you can manage and automatically scale a pool of headless Chrome / Puppeteer instances, maintain queues of URLs to crawl, store crawling results locally or in the cloud, rotate proxies and much more.

  • ArchiveBox Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-13

ArchiveBox is a powerful, self-hosted internet archiving solution to collect, save, and view sites you want to preserve offline.

You can set it up as a command-line tool, web app, and desktop app (alpha), on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

You can feed it URLs one at a time, or schedule regular imports from browser bookmarks or history, feeds like RSS, bookmark services like Pocket/Pinboard, and more. See input formats for a full list.

It saves snapshots of the URLs you feed it in several formats: HTML, PDF, PNG screenshots, WARC, and more out-of-the-box, with a wide variety of content extracted and preserved automatically (article text, audio/video, git repos, etc.). See output formats for a full list.

The goal is to sleep soundly knowing the part of the internet you care about will be automatically preserved in durable, easily accessible formats for decades after it goes down.

Apify

Website
apify.com
$ Details
-
Platforms
-
Release Date
-
Startup details
Country
Czech Republic
City
Prague
Employees
10 - 19

ArchiveBox

Pricing URL
-
$ Details
free
Platforms
Linux Mac OSX Docker
Release Date
2017 May

Apify features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    Apify provides a user-friendly interface that makes it easy for users of all technical levels to create and manage web scraping tasks.
  • Scalability
    Apify is built to handle tasks of various sizes, from small-scale projects to enterprise-level operations, making it a scalable solution.
  • Integration and API Support
    It offers extensive API support, allowing for seamless integration with other tools and systems to enhance automated workflows.
  • Customizability
    Users can customize their scraping bots (actors) with different settings and scripts to fit specific needs and requirements.
  • Cloud-based
    Being a cloud-based platform, Apify allows users to run their scraping tasks without needing local resources, which is convenient and efficient.
  • Comprehensive Documentation
    Apify provides thorough documentation and tutorials, which help users get started quickly and solve issues efficiently.
  • Community and Support
    Apify has an active community and solid customer support to assist users with their needs and enhance their overall experience.

Possible disadvantages of Apify

  • Learning Curve
    While the interface is user-friendly, there may still be a learning curve for those new to web scraping and automation.
  • Cost
    Apify can be expensive compared to other web scraping tools, particularly for extensive use cases that require high volumes of data.
  • Dependency on External Factors
    Web scraping often depends on the stability of the target websites. Changes in website structures can break scripts, requiring ongoing maintenance.
  • Performance Limitations
    The performance of cloud-based scraping tasks can be affected by network latency and other external factors beyond user control.
  • Potential Legal Issues
    Web scraping can raise legal concerns, particularly when scraping data from websites that restrict such activities in their terms of service.
  • Resource Intensity
    Complex scraping tasks can be resource-intensive, potentially requiring higher-tier subscriptions and more computing resources, driving up costs.

ArchiveBox features and specs

  • Offline website saving
  • Tagging
  • Scheduled archiving
  • Recursive crawling
  • Media extraction
  • Article text extraction
  • Static HTML exports
  • Full-text search

Analysis of Apify

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Apify is considered a good choice for web scraping and automation needs due to its comprehensive features, user-friendly interface, and strong community support. It is especially beneficial for those who require efficient, large-scale data extraction and workflow automation.

Why this product is good

  • Apify is an established platform known for its robust web scraping and automation capabilities. It provides a powerful API, pre-built actors for common tasks, and allows you to create custom web scrapers with ease. The platform is scalable, supports a variety of programming languages, and offers features like scheduling, proxies, and data storage solutions. This versatility makes it a valuable tool for businesses and developers needing efficient data retrieval and workflow automation.

Recommended for

  • Developers looking for a versatile web scraping solution.
  • Businesses needing to automate data collection processes.
  • Researchers and analysts requiring extensive data from the web.
  • Marketers seeking competitive analysis through data scraping.
  • Tech enthusiasts interested in exploring web automation tools.

Analysis of ArchiveBox

Overall verdict

  • ArchiveBox is a versatile and robust solution for individuals or organizations seeking to preserve web content. It provides a wide range of archiving options and allows for extensive customization. However, as a self-hosted tool, it requires some technical knowledge to set up and maintain, which may not be ideal for non-technical users. Overall, it is a good tool if you have the technical capability and need to consistently archive online assets.

Why this product is good

  • ArchiveBox is an open-source self-hosted tool designed to help users save and manage web content offline. It is appreciated for its ability to archive web content including static HTML, PDFs, and media files in a format that is easy to navigate and long-lasting, even if the source website becomes inaccessible. The tool supports multiple input methods, including browser integrations, and is capable of running on various platforms, thus offering flexibility and scalability for personal and professional use.

Recommended for

    ArchiveBox is recommended for digital archivists, researchers, journalists, and any individuals or organizations that need to reliably save and organize web content. It is particularly suitable for those with the technical expertise to manage a self-hosted setup and who require an offline, permanent record of online information.

Apify videos

Apify product news - 2019/01/30

ArchiveBox videos

Archiving the Internet Before it All Rots Away (talk by by ArchiveBox founder)

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Installing ArchiveBox On Ubuntu 20.04 Using A Hyper-V VM To Preserve OSINT Investigation Findings

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Apify and ArchiveBox)
Web Scraping
100 100%
0% 0
Bookmark Manager
0 0%
100% 100
Data Extraction
100 100%
0% 0
Bookmarks
0 0%
100% 100

Questions & Answers

As answered by people managing Apify and ArchiveBox.

Which are the primary technologies used for building your product?

ArchiveBox's answer:

  • Django
  • SQLite
  • Wget
  • Chromium
  • Youtube-dl / yt-dlp
  • singlefile
  • readability
  • mercury
  • git
  • ripgrep
  • sonic

Who are some of the biggest customers of your product?

ArchiveBox's answer:

What's the story behind your product?

ArchiveBox's answer:

ArchiveBox aims to enable more of the internet to be saved from deterioration by empowering people to self-host their own archives. The intent is for all the web content you care about to be viewable with common software in 50 - 100 years without needing to run ArchiveBox or other specialized software to replay it.

Vast treasure troves of knowledge are lost every day on the internet to link rot. As a society, we have an imperative to preserve some important parts of that treasure, just like we preserve our books, paintings, and music in physical libraries long after the originals go out of print or fade into obscurity.

Whether it's to resist censorship by saving articles before they get taken down or edited, or just to save a collection of early 2010's flash games you love to play, having the tools to archive internet content enables to you save the stuff you care most about before it disappears.

Image from WTF is Link Rot?... The balance between the permanence and ephemeral nature of content on the internet is part of what makes it beautiful. I don't think everything should be preserved in an automated fashion--making all content permanent and never removable, but I do think people should be able to decide for themselves and effectively archive specific content that they care about.

Because modern websites are complicated and often rely on dynamic content, ArchiveBox archives the sites in several different formats beyond what public archiving services like Archive.org/Archive.is save. Using multiple methods and the market-dominant browser to execute JS ensures we can save even the most complex, finicky websites in at least a few high-quality, long-term data formats.

Why should a person choose your product over its competitors?

ArchiveBox's answer:

ArchiveBox differentiates itself from similar self-hosted projects by providing both a comprehensive CLI interface for managing your archive, a Web UI that can be used either independently or together with the CLI, and a simple on-disk data format that can be used without either.

ArchiveBox is neither the highest fidelity nor the simplest tool available for self-hosted archiving, rather it's a jack-of-all-trades that tries to do most things well by default. It can be as simple or advanced as you want, and is designed to do everything out-of-the-box but be tuned to suit your needs.

If you want better fidelity for very complex interactive pages with heavy JS/streams/API requests, check out ArchiveWeb.page and ReplayWeb.page.

If you want more bookmark categorization and note-taking features, check out Archivy, Memex, Polar, or LinkAce.

If you need more advanced recursive spider/crawling ability beyond --depth=1, check out Browsertrix, Photon, or Scrapy and pipe the outputted URLs into ArchiveBox.

How would you describe the primary audience of your product?

ArchiveBox's answer:

  • journalists
  • lawyers
  • librarians
  • digital preservation specialists
  • researchers
  • students
  • homelab / self-hosting community

User comments

Share your experience with using Apify and ArchiveBox. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Apify and ArchiveBox

Apify Reviews

Top 15 Best TinyTask Alternatives in 2022
This is another tinytask alternative. For you to link various web services and APIs, Apify has provided many web integration options. You can add data processing and customised computation processes in addition to letting the data flow between them. With the data that is freely accessible on the web, you may provide crucial insights, and easy lead creation allows you to...

ArchiveBox Reviews

We have no reviews of ArchiveBox yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, ArchiveBox should be more popular than Apify. It has been mentiond 93 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Apify mentions (46)

  • Google's News API has been gone since 2016, and people still search for it
    That runs News Scraper on Apify, which is the same forty lines plus the parts that are Tedious rather than hard: both feeds, the nested publisher element, the date Normalisation, and deduplication. - Source: dev.to / 4 days ago
  • WHOIS is gone, RDAP replaced it, and a 404 does not mean what you think
    That runs an Apify Actor I maintain, Domain Scraper, because the Tedious parts are the RDAP bootstrap, the vcard unpacking and the provider Fingerprinting rather than the HTTP call. If you would rather do it yourself, Https://rdap.org/domain/ is the whole API and it needs no key. - Source: dev.to / 4 days ago
  • How I Turned Canadian Open Government Data Into a Live Licence-Verification Site + API (Build Log, 2026)
    Data collection: Apify actors, one per source, that scrape the open-data endpoints and normalize them. Quebec RBQ ships a daily bulk CSV (inside a 10.8 MB zip, ~924k rows that dedupe to ~54k active licences). Ontario HCRA has no bulk file โ€” it's an internal JSON API behind the public registry. - Source: dev.to / 23 days ago
  • How to Track US Startup Funding Rounds in Real Time (Before TechCrunch Writes About Them)
    Create a free Apify account and grab your API token from Settings โ†’ API & Integrations. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • I built a Claude Code skill that finds customers, not competitors, on Reddit & LinkedIn
    BYOK. It runs on your own Apify token. No shared keys, no lock-in, no licensing chokepoint โ€” a lesson the whole "Proxycurl shut down and stranded everyone" saga taught the space. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
View more

ArchiveBox mentions (93)

  • Wikipedia bans Archive.today after site executed DDoS and altered web captures
    A bit off topic, but are there any self hosted open source archiving servers people are using for personal usage? I think ArchiveBox[1] is the most popular. I will give it a shot, but it's a shame they don't support URL rewriting[2], which would be pretty important to me. I read a lot of blog and news articles that are split across multiple pages, and it's quite annoying to have to individually search through the... - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • Internet Increasingly Becoming Unarchivable
    I run an ArchiveBox instance locally. Recommended! https://archivebox.io/. - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago
  • YouTube downloaders (and how Google silenced the press)
    Https://archivebox.io/ could be a solution for that. - Source: Hacker News / 11 months ago
  • Linkwarden: FOSS self-hostable bookmarking with AI-tagging and page archival
    I've used https://historio.us since 2011 and still pay for it to keep access to all the pages I've archived over the years. The price has been kept low enough that I can't bring myself to cancel it even though I've been using self-hosted https://archivebox.io/ for the last few years. I always include an archived link whenever I reference something in documentation. That's my main use at the moment. However, I... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Ask HN: How Do You Bookmark?
    2. Drop the link into my instance of ArchiveBox [0] and will return to it a few weeks/months later or, more often than not, never again [0] https://archivebox.io/. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Apify and ArchiveBox, you can also consider the following products

import.io - Import. io helps its users find the internet data they need, organize and store it, and transform it into a format that provides them with the context they need.

Raindrop.io - All your articles, photos, video & content from web & apps in one place.

Octoparse - Octoparse provides easy web scraping for anyone. Our advanced web crawler, allows users to turn web pages into structured spreadsheets within clicks.

wallabag - Save the web, freely.

Bright Data - World's largest proxy service with a residential proxy network of 72M IPs worldwide and proxy management interface for zero coding.

Archive.org - Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library offering free universal access to books, movies...