Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Apify VS Simple Scraper

Compare Apify VS Simple Scraper 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.

Simple Scraper logo Simple Scraper

Extract data from any website in seconds — download instantly, scrape in the cloud, or create an API.
  • 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.

  • Simple Scraper Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-29

Simple scraper is the easiest way to scrape the web — turn any website into an API in seconds and use ready-made scraping recipes to scrape popular sites with ease.

Apify

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

Simple Scraper

$ Details
freemium $30.0 / Monthly (6,000 credits)
Release Date
2019 November

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.

Simple Scraper features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    SimpleScraper offers a user-friendly interface that allows even those without technical knowledge to easily extract data from websites.
  • Speed
    The tool allows for fast data extraction, reducing the time needed to gather information manually.
  • Automation
    Users can set up automated scraping tasks to run at regular intervals, which is useful for keeping data up-to-date without manual intervention.
  • API Access
    SimpleScraper provides API access, allowing developers to integrate scraping functionality into their own applications seamlessly.
  • Browser Extension
    The tool offers a browser extension, making it convenient to set up scraping tasks directly from the browser.

Possible disadvantages of Simple Scraper

  • Cost
    Advanced features and higher usage limits come with a subscription fee, which may not be feasible for all users.
  • Website Restrictions
    Some websites employ measures to prevent scraping, which may limit the effectiveness of SimpleScraper on such sites.
  • Data Quality
    Automated scraping can sometimes result in incomplete or inaccurate data, requiring manual verification.
  • Learning Curve
    Though designed to be user-friendly, there can still be a learning curve for those completely new to web scraping.
  • Resource Intensive
    Running multiple or complex scraping tasks can be resource-intensive and may affect the performance of your system.

Apify videos

Apify product news - 2019/01/30

Simple Scraper videos

Super Simple Scraper Review

More videos:

  • Review - Super Simple Scraper RevieW
  • Review - Scraping with Simple Scraper in under 30 seconds

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Apify and Simple Scraper)
Web Scraping
84 84%
16% 16
Data Extraction
87 87%
13% 13
Data
100 100%
0% 0
API Tools
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 Simple Scraper

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...

Simple Scraper Reviews

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

Social recommendations and mentions

Apify might be a bit more popular than Simple Scraper. We know about 26 links to it since March 2021 and only 20 links to Simple Scraper. 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 / 3 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 1 month 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 / 8 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 / 8 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
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Simple Scraper mentions (20)

  • Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (October 2024)
    Making my data extraction Saas (https://simplescraper.io) more LLM friendly. Markdown extraction, improved Google search, workflows - search for this terms, visit the first N links, summarize etc. Big demand for (or rather, expectation of) this lately. - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago
  • The Architecture Behind a One-Person Tech Startup
    Things are much easier for one-person startups these days—it's a gift. I remember building a todo app as my first SaaS project, and choosing something called Stormpath for authentication. It subsequently shut down, forcing me to do a last-minute migration from a hostel in Japan using Nitrous Cloud IDE (which also shut down). Just pain upon pain.[1] Now, you can just pick a full-stack cloud service and run with it.... - Source: Hacker News / 11 months ago
  • A list of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings that have free tiers of interest to devops and infradev
    Simplescraper — Trigger your webhook after each operation. The free plan includes 100 cloud scrape credits. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
    I run Simplescraper (https://simplescraper.io). Started in 2020 and it's now profitable. > Have any recent trends affected your business? Not really. People like data as much as ever. As a one-person biz, the main dilemma remains how to juggle development, marketing and support. Reaching a point where the price of context-switching to customer support is becoming a little too high. But that's easily fixable and... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
  • Experimental library for scraping websites using OpenAI's GPT API
    > perhaps you can simply ask the API to create Python or JS code that is deterministic, instead. Had a conversation last week with a customer that did exactly that - spent 15 minutes in chatGPT generating working Scrapy code. Neat to see people solve their own problem so easily but it doesn't yet erode our value. I run https://simplescraper.io and a lot of value is integrations,scale, proxies, scheduling,... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Apify and Simple Scraper, 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.

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

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

Content Grabber - Content Grabber is an automated web scraping tool.

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

Diggernaut - Web scraping is just became easy. Extract any website content and turn it into datasets. No programming skills required.