Apify Actors
Actors are serverless cloud programs that automate tasks like web scraping, data processing, and AI agents. They are called Actors because, like human actors, they perform actions based on a script. They scale from simple tasks to complex workflows and integrate easily with APIs, databases, and AI models.
Long-running serverless jobs
Apify Actors can perform time-consuming jobs that are longer than the lifespan of a single HTTP transaction.
Publish and monetize Actors
Join hundreds of developers who share their Actors on Apify Store and earn money from coding.
Auto-generated user interface
Actors can easily define a user interface for their input configuration. Take advantage of lower-level features and settings, or run Actors using our API.
Keep your Actor running
You can run Actors as real-time APIs with Actor Standby mode. It lets you keep the Actor ready in the background, waiting for incoming HTTP requests, just like a real-time web server or standard API server.
Integrations
Integrate your Actors with other systems. Connect Apify actors and tasks with your favorite web apps and cloud services.
Proxy
Improve the performance of your web scrapers by smartly rotating datacenter and residential IP addresses.
Storage
Store data from your Actors in one of our Apify storages: key-value stores, datasets, or request queues.
What else do Actors give you?
Host code anywhere
Edit your code on our platform, fetch from a Git repository, or push from your machine.
Docker support
Actors run inside Docker containers on Apify servers. Use a custom Dockerfile.
Ready for scale
Run as many Actors as you need. The Apify platform provisions the necessary resources.
Custom memory and CPU
Assign each Actor any RAM volume needed. CPU share is allocated automatically.
Command-line tool
Develop and test your Actors locally, push them to the Apify platform when you're ready.
Logging
View and download logs to debug your code and monitor performance on production.
Apify open source fair share
Apify will support and reward every open-source project on Apify Store. Just turn your code into an Actor and choose your reward tier.
What are Actors?
Actors are lightweight, containerized programs that take JSON inputs, execute tasks, and return structured outputs. Inspired by UNIX philosophy, they offer a simple, composable approach to automation, web scraping, and AI workflows in the cloud.
