How to use Apify without writing code

Contains affiliate links. Disclosure.

Apify hosts pre-built scrapers called Actors. Using one takes no code: open the Store, pick the Actor for the site you want, fill in its input form, press Start, then download the results as CSV, Excel or JSON. That loop is the whole product for most people, and it runs on the free plan.

What this page is not. It is not Apify Academy, which teaches you to build scrapers in JavaScript and Python. Everything below is about running scrapers that already exist.

Your first scrape, step by step

1. Create a free account at apify.com. The Free plan is $0/month with $5 of platform credit and no credit card at signup (apify.com/pricing, checked 2026-09-09).
2. Open Google Maps Scraper — 596,302 total users and a 98.1% run success rate on its Store page (checked 2026-09-09). It is the most forgiving Actor to learn on because a bad input returns zero rows rather than a wall of errors.
3. Enter one search term and one location, set the place limit to 10, and press Start. Keep the limit small. The point of the first run is to see the output shape, not to collect data.
4. Open the Storage tab and export — CSV, Excel, JSON, or straight into Google Sheets, Make.com or n8n.

Most of those ten minutes is the signup. If you want the same run explained field by field, read Scrape Google Maps.

Each guide here names the Actor it tested and its Free-plan price; the same Apify scrapers are summarised on the homepage as one price ladder, cheapest site first.

What does a first run cost?

Two layers, and first-time users miss the second one.

Layer one is your plan. Free is $0 with $5 of monthly platform credit. The cheapest paid tier is Starter at $19/month ^{subject to change · verified 2026-09-09}, or $17/month billed annually, which includes $19 of usage and bills compute at $0.20 per Compute Unit (apify.com/pricing, checked 2026-09-09).

Layer two is the Actor's own price, charged on top. Google Maps Scraper lists "from $1.50 / 1,000 scraped places" on its Store page (checked 2026-09-09), so the 10-place test run above costs roughly $0.015 against your credit. That ratio is why the free plan is enough to work through most of the tutorials below, and why an unbounded run on a per-result Actor can drain a month's credit without the platform usage chart ever looking busy.

If your monthly volume is under a few thousand results, stay on Free and read what the free plan covers before you upgrade anything.

Which site do you want to scrape?

Target	What you get	Guide
Google Maps	Local businesses, reviews, contact fields	Scrape Google Maps
Amazon	Products, prices, reviews	Scrape Amazon products
Instagram	Profiles, posts, hashtags	Scrape Instagram
Facebook	Pages, public content	Scrape Facebook
E-commerce (any shop)	Competitor prices across stores	Scrape e-commerce prices
LinkedIn	Public professional data	Scrape LinkedIn
TikTok	Videos, profiles, engagement	Scrape TikTok
YouTube	Videos, comments, metadata	Scrape YouTube
Twitter / X	Posts, profiles, search	Scrape Twitter/X
Reddit	Subreddits, threads, comments	Scrape Reddit
Google SERP	Rankings, ads, People Also Ask	Scrape Google SERPs
Google Trends	Interest over time, by region	Scrape Google Trends
Travel	Google Flights, Airbnb	Scrape Google Flights and Airbnb
AI and LLM sites	Public AI product pages	Scrape AI and LLM sites
Zillow	Listings and agent data	Scrape Zillow
Apollo.io	Not available. Apify states Apollo scrapers "are not available right now because of the company's strict terms of use, even if you have a paid Apollo account" (apify.com/scrapers/apollo, checked 2026-09-09)	What to use instead
Any other website	Crawl to Markdown or text, for RAG	Scrape website content
Claude, Cursor, VS Code	Let an assistant start runs for you	Use MCP servers

Changed since this page was last written (2026-09-09): the Apollo row above used to point at a working tutorial. Apify has withdrawn those scrapers, so it now points at the replacement lead sources instead. Apify's MCP integration also stopped being an Actor you run — it is a hosted endpoint at https://mcp.apify.com that your client connects to (docs.apify.com/platform/integrations/mcp, checked 2026-09-09).

How do you get data out automatically?

Manual export is fine once. After that, pick a delivery route.

Goal	Where to start
Repeat the same run daily or weekly	Schedules
Rows landing in a spreadsheet	Google Sheets integration
A ping when a run finishes	Slack integration
Visual workflow builder	Make.com guide · Sign up
Self-hosted workflow builder	n8n integration guide
Calling runs from your own code	Apify REST API tutorial
Feeding a RAG pipeline	Data for AI and RAG

One caveat before you build a schedule on it: Apify's own two sources disagree on how many runs the free plan can execute at once. The pricing page lists 5 concurrent runs; the platform limits table lists 25 (both checked 2026-09-09 at apify.com/pricing and docs.apify.com/platform/limits). Plan for 5, and confirm the real number on your own account's Limits page before anything depends on it.

Further reading: Make.com + Apify, end to end, n8n + Apify, and exporting scraped data to Excel and Sheets.

When no-code stops being the right answer

Three cases where the Store loop is the wrong tool, and we would rather say so than sell you a run that fails.

• No Actor covers your site, and the pages need real logic. Website Content Crawler will get you text, but not structured fields. Writing a scraper with Crawlee is the shorter path. Start at Apify for developers.
• You need results inside your own product, on demand. Clicking Start in the Console does not scale to that. Drive it through the REST API or Standby mode.
• You only ever want clean Markdown from a list of URLs for a RAG index. That is a narrower job than Apify is built for, and a crawl-to-Markdown API can be cheaper for it. We compare the two honestly in Apify vs Firecrawl.

If none of those describe you, the no-code path is genuinely enough. Create the free account, run Google Maps Scraper against 10 places, export the CSV, and pick your real target from the table above.

Frequently Asked Questions

No, not for anything on this page. You pick an Actor, fill in its input form, press Start, and export the dataset. Code becomes useful when you want the REST API, an SDK, or a custom Actor for a site nobody has covered.

The Free plan is $0 per month with $5 of platform credit and no card at signup (apify.com/pricing, checked 2026-09-09). Actors charge on top of that: Google Maps Scraper lists from $1.50 per 1,000 scraped places, so a 10-place test run is about 1.5 cents. Keep result limits low and $5 covers most of the guides here.

Google Maps if you want local business leads, Amazon if you want product and price monitoring. Both return recognisable data on the first run, so you can tell immediately whether the inputs were right.

Not currently. Apify's own Apollo scrapers page states that Apollo scrapers are not available because of Apollo's strict terms of use, even for paid Apollo accounts (checked 2026-09-09). Use the other lead sources covered in our Apollo guide instead.

Search the Apify Store by the site's domain name first, since the catalogue is far larger than this index. If nothing fits, Website Content Crawler handles arbitrary sites, and a custom Actor built with Crawlee handles the rest.

Scraping public data is often lawful, but terms of service, contract terms and privacy law still apply, and they vary by jurisdiction and by the kind of data. Read our web scraping legality guide, and take legal advice for regulated or personal data.

Yes, over MCP. Apify runs a hosted MCP server at https://mcp.apify.com that clients such as Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor and VS Code connect to (docs.apify.com/platform/integrations/mcp, checked 2026-09-09). It is no longer an Actor you start yourself.