Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Apify VS Extractor API

Compare Apify VS Extractor API and see what are their differences

Apify logo Apify

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

Extractor API logo Extractor API

Extract clean text from thousands of articles with a simple API request or use our visual web tool - we'll handle IP rotation, retries and everything else. Features include news search, translation, and ML-powered text extraction.
  • 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.

  • Extractor API Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-11

Features

IP Rotation & JS Rendering

We automatically apply IP rotation and retries to every request (Free Plan included), and all our paid plans allow you to render JavaScript before extraction.

Search Country News

Free and paid plans can search the world's news with our News Search endpoint. Every request returns up to 100 news items, including metadata. Collect the URLs - then extract clean text with our Extractor endpoint.

Clean Text & Metadata

Extract clean text, HTML, image and video links, authors, title, publication date, html, and raw text. Choose only the fields you need.

API Not Required

You can extract data from up to 1,000 URLs at a time using our online visual extractor - not just the API. The visual extractor is included in all plans.

Store Your Results

Both the API and the visual extractor allow you to store your results in Jobs. Assign your target URLs a job name, then see their progress online or programmatically. Once the job is done, you can retrieve the results any time.

Translate Extracted Text

All paid accounts are able to translate to and from 55 languages. Swahili to English, Vietnamese to French, or anything you want - extract clean text and translate it with a single API call.

Apify

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

Extractor API

$ Details
freemium
Platforms
Windows Browser Web Android iOS Mac OSX Google Chrome Linux Firefox Cross Platform REST API Safari JavaScript iPhone Chrome OS Internet Explorer Windows Phone Python Node JS Ruby Java C PHP .Net Go Swift C++ Docker ReactJS TypeScript
Release Date
2020 March

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.

Extractor API features and specs

  • Robust API
    We handle IP rotation, retries and JavaScript rendering - you get clean text.
  • News Search
    Search the world's news with a single API call - up to 100 results per request.
  • Extract Everything
    Extract clean text, translate it into 50+ languages and get tons of metadata.
  • Visual Extraction
    Don't want to use the API? Use our visual online tool to paste or upload URLs!
  • Persistent Jobs
    Both our API and online tool allow you to save extracted text to your Jobs page.
  • Quick Start
    Check out the Getting Started guide for a quick overview of the API and the FAQ for more info.

Apify videos

Apify product news - 2019/01/30

Extractor API videos

Extractor API - Visual Extractor Demo

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Apify and Extractor API)
Web Scraping
100 100%
0% 0
Web Scraping API
92 92%
8% 8
Data Extraction
98 98%
2% 2
Enterprise Search
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

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

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...

Extractor API Reviews

Creating an Automated Text Extraction Workflow — Part 1
The 600 lbs gorilla, Diffbot, comes with a swath of solid APIs but starts at $300, which is ridiculous if you’re just extracting text. Scrapinghub’s News API, Extractor API, and plenty more are better priced if you want an affordable alternative; plus, Extractor API includes a visual online tool for extracting hundreds of articles at once, if you want to do things via UI.
Source: medium.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Apify should be more popular than Extractor API. It has been mentiond 26 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 (26)

  • How to scrape TikTok using Python
    For deployment, we'll use the Apify platform. It's a simple and effective environment for cloud deployment, allowing efficient interaction with your crawler. Call it via API, schedule tasks, integrate with various services, and much more. - Source: dev.to / 17 days ago
  • How to scrape Bluesky with Python
    We already have a fully functional implementation for local execution. Let us explore how to adapt it for running on the Apify Platform and transform in Apify Actor. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Web scraping with GPT-4o: powerful but expensive
    We've had the best success by first converting the HTML to a simpler format (i.e. markdown) before passing it to the LLM. There are a few ways to do this that we've tried, namely Extractus[0] and dom-to-semantic-markdown[1]. Internally we use Apify[2] and Firecrawl[3] for Magic Loops[4] that run in the cloud, both of which have options for simplifying pages built-in, but for our Chrome Extension we use... - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago
  • Current problems and mistakes of web scraping in Python and tricks to solve them!
    Developed by Apify, it is a Python adaptation of their famous JS framework crawlee, first released on Jul 9, 2019. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • Show HN: Crawlee for Python – a web scraping and browser automation library
    Hey all, This is Jan, the founder of [Apify](https://apify.com/)—a full-stack web scraping platform. After the success of [Crawlee for JavaScript](https://github.com/apify/crawlee/) today! The main features are: - A unified programming interface for both HTTP (HTTPX with BeautifulSoup) & headless browser crawling (Playwright). - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
View more

Extractor API mentions (3)

  • webscraping for sentiment analysis
    Take a look at our webscraping API - should be able to do what you need it to do. https://extractorapi.com/. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Using ChatGPT to build a database from web scraping?
    If you want to make it easier, we built a text extraction tool that can fit a number of use cases https://extractorapi.com/ people are using it instead of GPT for the scraping and then in certain cases feeding the data that comes from here to some broader app/use case. Just another route! Source: about 2 years ago
  • Text Extraction Tool for Training your ChatGPT app
    I'm looking for input on our tool as a pipeline for text data into your own ChatGPT use case. We know you can use ChatGPT API to do the same task, but we've found that to be costly and time-consuming for the text extraction/scraping portion. We've built a cost-effective and quick tool, Extractor API, for that use case. Would love to see what others are using outside of just relying on ChatGPT for text extraction. Source: about 2 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Apify and Extractor API, 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.

Schema API - Extract structured content from the semantic web

Scrapy - Scrapy | A Fast and Powerful Scraping and Web Crawling Framework

Twinword Finder - Stop wasting time READING EVERYTHING. Read what you want and skip the rest. A Chrome browser extension that highlights related sections on any web page.

ParseHub - ParseHub is a free web scraping tool. With our advanced web scraper, extracting data is as easy as clicking the data you need.

SummarizeBot API - Integrate our premium text and image analysis APIs into applications that may require artificial intelligence features. Start for free, no payment or credit card information required!