Apify vs Scrapy for crawling many websites

If your goal is crawling many websites, the choice between Apify and Scrapy mostly comes down to speed of setup vs control at scale.

Quick take

• Choose Apify if you want:

  • faster setup
  • built-in hosting, scheduling, proxies, retries, storage
  • less infrastructure work
  • easier scaling for multiple sites

• Choose Scrapy if you want:

  • full control over crawling logic
  • a lightweight Python framework
  • lower cost at small/medium scale
  • a codebase you fully own and can extend deeply

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Apify

Pros

• Managed platform: infrastructure, scaling, and storage are handled for you.
• Proxy rotation / anti-blocking tooling: useful when crawling many sites.
• Scheduling and automation built in.
• Actor model makes deployment simple.
• Good when you need to spin up many crawls quickly.

Cons

• More of a platform/ecosystem than just a framework.
• Can become costly at scale, depending on usage.
• Less low-level control than building your own stack.
• You’re somewhat tied to Apify’s way of doing things.

Best for

• Teams that want to get crawling running quickly
• Non-trivial crawling with operational convenience
• Large-scale scraping without wanting to manage servers

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Scrapy

Pros

• Excellent crawling framework for Python.
• Very flexible and mature.
• Great for structured crawling logic, pipelines, and spider control.
• Easier to integrate into an existing Python codebase.
• No platform lock-in.

Cons

• You must handle deployment, scaling, monitoring, proxies, retries, storage, etc. yourself or via other tools.
• For many sites, operational complexity grows fast.
• Browser-based crawling is not native; you’ll need extras like Playwright/Selenium for JS-heavy sites.

Best for

• Engineering teams comfortable managing infrastructure
• Custom crawl logic and data pipelines
• Cost-sensitive projects where you can self-host

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For “many websites” specifically

Apify is stronger when:

• websites are heterogeneous
• you need to quickly adapt to new sites
• some sites are anti-bot protected
• you want automation and operational simplicity

Scrapy is stronger when:

• the crawling rules are stable and well-defined
• you want to run many spiders in a controlled environment
• you already have infrastructure and DevOps support
• you want maximum flexibility and minimal platform dependency

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Practical recommendation

• If you’re a small team or moving fast: Apify
• If you’re a Python-heavy team with infrastructure support: Scrapy
• If the sites are highly dynamic/JS-heavy: Apify + browser tools or Scrapy + Playwright
• If you plan to run long-term, custom, high-volume crawling at low cost: Scrapy is often the better base

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A simple rule of thumb

• Need results this week? Apify
• Need a long-term custom crawler stack? Scrapy

If you want, I can also give you:

1. a feature-by-feature comparison table,
2. a cost/scaling comparison, or
3. a recommendation based on your exact use case.