Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Packer VS Apify

Compare Packer VS Apify and see what are their differences

Packer logo Packer

Packer is an open-source software for creating identical machine images from a single source configuration.

Apify logo Apify

Apify is a web scraping and automation platform that can turn any website into an API.
  • Packer Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-15
  • 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.

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Apify videos

Apify product news - 2019/01/30

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Packer and Apify)
DevOps Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Web Scraping
0 0%
100% 100
Continuous Integration And Delivery
Data Extraction
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 Packer and Apify

Packer Reviews

Introduction to Top Open Source Virtualization Tools
Packer is notably light, high performing, and operates on every major operating system. It assembles and configures all the necessary components for a virtual machine then creates images that run on multiple platforms. Packer doesn’t replace configuration management tools like Puppet or Chef; as a matter of fact, when creating images, Packer can utilize tools like Puppet or...

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...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Apify should be more popular than Packer. It has been mentiond 21 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.

Packer mentions (9)

  • Failed to connect to the host via SSH on Ubuntu 22.04
    If you have just upgraded to Ubuntu 22.04, and you suddenly experience either errors when trying to ssh into hosts, or when running ansible or again when running the ansible provisioner building a packer image, this is probably going to be useful for you. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Create a minimalist OS using Docker Containers and Hashicorp Packer
    I am already using Hashicorp Packer at work and for personal projects and I wanted to test This idea out by wrapping it a single Packer Template file. This reduces the level of maintaining a lot of small scripts, Dockerfiles and configurations and the user can simply trigger a couple of Commands to get a minimalist OS at the end of the process. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.
    And while it is a slight increase in complexity, it can be an overall net gain in functionality, configurability and reliability. Much like Packer is far more reliable and practical than manually making VM images sitting in front of a terminal, even though making the initial configuration takes some time. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Customized Ubuntu Images using Packer + QEMU + Cloud-Init & UEFI bootloading
    Hashicorp Packer provides a nice wrapper / abstraction over the QEMU in order to boot the image and use it to set it up on first-boot. Instead of writing really long commands in order to boot up the image using QEMU, Packer provided a nice Configuration Template in a more Readable fashion. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • The journey of sharing a wired USB printer over the network
    Packer seemed like the perfect tool for the job. I have never used it before and wanted to get familiar with the tool. It doesn't come with ARM support out of the box, but there are two community projects to fill that niche. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
View more

Apify mentions (21)

  • Automating Data Collection with Apify: From Script to Deployment
    In this article, I will walk you through everything, from crafting your initial scraping script (Actor) using the Apify SDK for TypeScript to deploying it to the Apify Actors Store for seamless data collection, and then, I will show you how to run your deployed Actor on the Apify platform. With Apify, you don't need to be a programming pro to harness the power of web scraping and start gaining insights. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • Web Scraping in Python – The Complete Guide
    I am surprised nobody mentioned https://apify.com/ and they even offer discount for YC startups as ex-graduate from the YC Combinator program. - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • AI tools I have found useful w/ research. What do you guys think? What did I miss?
    Web Scraping, Data Extraction and Automation · Apify ( https://apify.com/ ). Source: 12 months ago
  • How to scrape the web with Puppeteer in 2023
    At this point of the tutorial, I'll take the opportunity to do a bit of self-promotion. I'm the COO of Apify, a cloud platform that helps you develop, run, and maintain your web scrapers easily and efficiently. It comes with tons of features like queue storages and proxies, and it supports Puppeteer without any extra configuration. You can run the above scraper, save results and control everything with a powerful... - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Web Search and Scrape
    Apify a saas that can be helpful in this situation since you can use its api to call actors from your java code. Source: over 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

Terraform - Tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently.

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.

Rancher - Open Source Platform for Running a Private Container Service

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

Puppet Enterprise - Get started with Puppet Enterprise, or upgrade or expand.

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