Apify alternative: Why teams choose cloro for AI scraping

Apify is a marketplace. With thousands of scraping actors for every imaginable website, they’ve built a flexible platform where the community contributes scrapers.

But flexibility comes with maintenance overhead. When sites change, actors break, and you’re responsible for fixing them or finding replacements.

The marketplace model

Apify’s approach:

• Platform + Actors
• Find an actor for each site
• Configure and run
• Maintain when things break

Great for flexibility. Challenging for stability.

What Apify does well

Apify has built something unique:

• Massive library – Thousands of scraping actors
• Community contributions – Actors for every major site
• Flexibility – Scrape almost anything
• Actor marketplace – Monetize your scrapers
• Affordable entry – Starter at $29/month with $29 in platform credits

For diverse scraping needs, Apify offers unmatched flexibility.

Where cloro wins

1. Purpose-Built vs Generic

Apify: Generic actors that might work for AI platforms (when they don’t break).

cloro: Purpose-built for AI platforms, actively maintained.

• ChatGPT – Native support, always working
• Perplexity – Built-in, zero configuration
• Copilot – Optimized endpoints
• Gemini, Grok – Comprehensive coverage

2. Fully Managed vs DIY Maintenance

Apify: You maintain actors. When sites change, you fix them.

cloro: We handle everything.

Apify maintenance:

• Actor breaks → You debug
• Site changes → You update actor
• API changes → You adapt code

cloro:

• AI platform changes → We update
• API modifications → We handle it
• You just get clean data

3. Transparent vs Complex Pricing

Apify: Platform fees + actor costs.

• Platform: $29/month with $29 in credits
• Compute units: ~$20 for 50 CUs
• Proxy traffic: ~$25 for 5 GB
• Per-run costs: $10-50+ for some actors

Hard to predict monthly spend.

cloro: $0.90 per 1,000 for Google Search with extended parsing

Predictable pricing with AI Overviews and citations included.

4. Clean Data vs Variable Quality

Apify: Data quality varies by actor.

cloro: Consistent, parsed, structured data.

Every cloro response follows the same clean structure.

When to choose Apify

Choose Apify if you need:

• Diverse scraping – Many different websites
• Custom scrapers – Build and maintain your own
• Flexibility – Scrape anything with actors
• Community support – Leverage other’s work
• Budget-conscious entry – $29/month starter

When to choose cloro

Choose cloro if you need:

• AI platform scraping – ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini
• Zero maintenance – Fully managed, we handle updates
• Consistent data – Same format, always reliable
• Credit-based pricing – Different models cost different amounts
• Hands-off operation – Set and forget

The bottom line

Apify is excellent for flexible scraping with a marketplace model.

But for AI scraping and monitoring, cloro offers:

• Purpose-built – AI optimized vs generic actors

• Zero maintenance – Fully managed vs DIY updates

• Extended parsing – AI Overviews, citations vs not available

• Consistent data – Reliable vs variable quality

Use both: Apify for diverse web scraping + cloro for hands-off AI monitoring.

Most teams switch from Apify actors when they realize maintenance overhead is too high.

Switch from Apify and go fully managed with cloro.