# Apify vs Shaped

Apify records 4,147,762 monthly visits with +3.9% month-over-month growth and Freemium, Contact for Pricing pricing. Shaped records 11,871 monthly visits with -39.2% growth and Contact for Pricing pricing.

| Metric | [Apify](https://openaitools.app/tool/apify) | [Shaped](https://openaitools.app/tool/shaped) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| Website URL | https://www.apify.com | https://www.shaped.ai |
| Categories | AI Web Scraping, AI Agent, AI API, AI Developer Tools | AI Search Engine, AI API, Large Language Models (LLMs), AI Social Media |
| Pricing Model | Freemium, Contact for Pricing | Contact for Pricing |
| Monthly Visits | 4,147,762 | 11,871 |
| MoM Growth Rate | +3.9% | -39.2% |
| Primary Market | United States | United States |
| Direct Visits | 1,816,433 | 4,726 |
| Review Score | 4.6 | 4.8 |
| Saved Count | 6 | 3 |
| Supported Platforms | Website | Website |

## Apify

Apify started as a general-purpose web automation cloud and has grown into one of the largest marketplaces of turnkey web data extractors. The platform exposes a store of Actors — small containerized programs built by Apify and by third-party developers — that handle jobs like pulling Google Maps listings, TikTok videos, Instagram posts, Amazon prices, or crawling a documentation site into clean Markdown for a RAG pipeline. Each Actor runs on Apify's cloud, can be triggered from an API, scheduled on a recurring basis, and wired into downstream storage or applications.\n\nBecause running scrapers in production is mostly an infrastructure problem, Apify bundles the unglamorous parts: rotating residential and datacenter proxies, browser fingerprinting and anti-blocking, retry logic, dataset and key-value storage, and monitoring. Developers who would rather write their own code can build Actors with the Apify SDK in Python or JavaScript, or use Crawlee, Apify's open-source crawling and browser-automation library, which works with Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium, and BeautifulSoup.\n\nRecently the platform has positioned itself around AI: the Apify MCP server and CLI let AI agents and assistants discover and call Actors as tools, and the Website Content Crawler Actor is explicitly designed to feed LLM applications and vector databases. Pricing follows a freemium model with monthly platform credits, pay-per-usage pricing for many Actors, and custom enterprise agreements.

**Pricing & Plans:** Freemium: a free plan with monthly usage credits, paid subscription tiers that scale credits and concurrency, consumption-based charges for many marketplace Actors, and custom enterprise pricing. Developer payouts are also available for published Actors.

- **Actor marketplace:** Over one hundred thousand ready-to-run scrapers and automation tools covering social media, maps, e-commerce, real estate, and general web crawling.
- **MCP server and CLI:** Connect Apify Actors directly to AI assistants and agents so they can search the store, run scrapers, and pull structured results as tool calls.
- **Anti-blocking and proxy infrastructure:** Managed proxy rotation and unblocking are built into the platform, so scrapers keep working when target sites add defenses.
- **Crawlee and the Apify SDK:** An open-source crawling library plus Python and JavaScript SDKs for building custom Actors with Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium, or Cheerio.
- **Scheduling, storage, and integrations:** Recurring runs, dataset exports to CSV/JSON/Excel, webhooks, and integrations with LangChain, LlamaIndex, Zapier, and thousands of apps.

**Strengths:** Enormous library of maintained scrapers means many jobs need no code at all; Infrastructure concerns like proxies, retries, and blocking are handled for you; Agent-ready through MCP, CLI, and API, with LangChain and LlamaIndex integrations; Generous free tier for testing plus a developer revenue-share program

**Limitations:** Costs scale with usage, so high-volume scraping can get expensive quickly; Quality varies between community-built Actors and first-party ones; Target sites change frequently, so some Actors break or need updating over time

[Profile (Markdown)](https://openaitools.app/tool/apify.md)

## Shaped

Shaped positions itself as "the only vector database with a feedback loop." Instead of a static embedding store, it continuously learns from every user interaction — clicks, purchases, watch time — so results get sharper the more your product is used. A single ShapedQL query can retrieve by text, user ID, or item ID, apply filters, score with ML models, and re-rank for diversity all at once.

The platform is built on a three-layer architecture. The query layer handles real-time retrieval and ranking with sub-50ms latency. The intelligence layer manages dynamic embeddings, user and item context, and continuous model training. The data layer connects to 30+ sources including Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Kafka, PostgreSQL, Shopify, and Amplitude, unifying batch and streaming data under a single schema without ETL.

Shaped advertises enterprise-grade security with SOC 2 Type II certification, GDPR/CCPA/HIPAA compliance, and a 99.95% uptime SLA, operating at 5B+ document scale. The site notes that Shaped has been acquired by Whatnot, while the product continues to operate under the Shaped brand with a free $100 credit tier and no credit card required to start.

**Pricing & Plans:** Contact for pricing. New users receive $100 in free credits with no credit card required; plans for Shaped Cloud are quoted based on usage and scale.

- **ShapedQL unified query language:** Retrieve, filter, score, and re-rank across semantic search, keyword search, and behavioral models in a single SQL-like query.
- **Personalized hybrid search:** Blends semantic and keyword retrieval, then re-ranks results by predicted click-through and engagement for each individual user.
- **Continuous learning feedback loop:** ML models retrain on live interaction signals so ranking quality improves automatically as your product generates traffic.
- **30+ native connectors:** Stream data directly from warehouses, analytics tools, and event pipelines like Snowflake, Kafka, BigQuery, and Shopify with no ETL.
- **Sub-50ms serving with enterprise scale:** Handles 5B+ documents at 99.95% uptime SLA, with SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA compliance.

**Strengths:** Unifies vector search, ML re-ranking, and training in one query instead of a fragile multi-vendor stack; Continuous learning from real interaction signals keeps results improving automatically; Broad connector ecosystem ingests batch and streaming data without custom ETL; Strong compliance posture (SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA) and a published 99.95% uptime SLA

**Limitations:** Pricing is quote-based, so costs are hard to estimate before contacting sales; The ShapedQL and pipeline concepts carry a learning curve for teams new to relevance engineering; Now part of Whatnot, so long-term standalone roadmap clarity may depend on the acquirer

[Profile (Markdown)](https://openaitools.app/tool/shaped.md)

## Frequently Asked Questions

### How do Apify and Shaped compare in monthly traffic?

Apify has 4,147,762 monthly visits, while Shaped has 11,871. Traffic estimates describe audience size, not product quality.

### How do their growth rates compare?

Apify has a month-over-month growth rate of +3.9%; Shaped has -39.2%.

### How does pricing compare?

Apify: Freemium, Contact for Pricing. Freemium: a free plan with monthly usage credits, paid subscription tiers that scale credits and concurrency, consumption-based charges for many marketplace Actors, and custom enterprise pricing. Developer payouts are also available for published Actors. Shaped: Contact for Pricing. Contact for pricing. New users receive $100 in free credits with no credit card required; plans for Shaped Cloud are quoted based on usage and scale.

## Alternatives

| # | Tool Name | Monthly Visits | MoM Growth Rate | Pricing Model | Summary | Profile (Markdown) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- |
| 1 | [n8n](https://openaitools.app/tool/n8n) | 4,522,449 | -7.4% | Freemium | Open-source workflow automation built for AI agents and technical teams | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/n8n.md) |
| 2 | [Firecrawl](https://openaitools.app/tool/firecrawl-dev) | 1,828,239 | -1.9% | Freemium, Contact for Pricing | Provides direct LLM-ready markdown conversion via API, but lacks Apify's massive marketplace of pre-built scraping actors. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/firecrawl-dev.md) |
| 3 | [Clay](https://openaitools.app/tool/clay-2-0) | 1,267,465 | -2.7% | Freemium, Free Trial, Contact for Pricing | Build GTM systems that turn data into revenue | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/clay-2-0.md) |
| 4 | [Exa](https://openaitools.app/tool/exa-ai) | 1,062,574 | +16.8% | Freemium, Contact for Pricing | Web search API and crawler built for AI agents | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/exa-ai.md) |
| 5 | [Bright Data](https://openaitools.app/tool/bright-data) | 802,752 | -5.9% | Free Trial, Paid | Offers enterprise-grade proxy networks and raw web data infrastructure, but lacks Apify's plug-and-play actor marketplace. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/bright-data.md) |
| 6 | [Algolia](https://openaitools.app/tool/algolia) | 689,970 | -11% | Freemium, Contact for Pricing | AI search and retrieval platform for modern apps and commerce | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/algolia.md) |
| 7 | [Gumloop](https://openaitools.app/tool/gumloop) | 379,557 | -21.1% | Freemium, Paid, Contact for Pricing | Automates complex business workflows with AI agents, but is less specialized for raw large-scale web scraping actors. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/gumloop.md) |
| 8 | [Pinecone](https://openaitools.app/tool/pinecone) | 286,732 | -31% | Freemium, Paid, Contact for Pricing | The managed vector database and knowledge engine for production AI | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/pinecone.md) |
| 9 | [Jina AI](https://openaitools.app/tool/jina-ai) | 280,782 | -16.5% | Freemium, Paid | Search foundation built from embeddings, rerankers, and reader APIs | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/jina-ai.md) |
| 10 | [PhantomBuster](https://openaitools.app/tool/phantombuster) | 279,012 | -10.1% | Freemium, Free Trial, Paid | Focuses heavily on pre-built social media automation and lead generation workflows rather than general web scraping. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/phantombuster.md) |

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Source: https://openaitools.app/compare/apify-vs-shaped

More Markdown: [Categories](https://openaitools.app/categories.md) · [Traffic rankings](https://openaitools.app/rankings.md) · [llms.txt](https://openaitools.app/llms.txt)