Apify vs Puppeteer: Platform vs Chrome Automation

What They Are

Apify is a cloud scraping platform. 2,000+ pre-built actors for common sites. Also supports custom development with Puppeteer and Playwright.

Puppeteer is a Node.js library by Google. It controls Chrome programmatically. Screenshots, PDFs, testing, and yes, scraping.

Feature Comparison

The Secret: They Work Together

Apify and Puppeteer are not either/or. Many Apify actors use Puppeteer under the hood. Apify's Crawlee framework wraps Puppeteer with added features:

• Automatic retries and error handling
• Request queuing and concurrency
• Proxy rotation
• Session management
• Cloud deployment

Write Puppeteer code. Deploy to Apify. Best of both worlds.

When to Use Apify Directly

• An actor already exists for your target
• You want data without coding
• Speed is more important than customization
• You do not want to manage Chrome instances

When to Write Puppeteer Code

• You need full control over browser behavior
• You are building a unique automation
• You want to deploy on Apify with your code
• Testing and screenshots, not just scraping

Code Example: Puppeteer on Apify

import { PuppeteerCrawler } from 'crawlee';

const crawler = new PuppeteerCrawler({
    async requestHandler({ page, request }) {
        await page.waitForSelector('.product');
        const title = await page.$eval('.product-title', el => el.textContent);
        console.log('Scraped:', title);
    },
});

await crawler.run(['https://shop.example.com']);

Puppeteer code. Apify infrastructure. No servers to manage.

Our Verdict

Start with Apify actors. If one exists for your use case, use it. If you need custom logic, write Puppeteer code and deploy it to Apify.

Pure Puppeteer makes sense only if you are running locally or have your own cloud infrastructure already.

Sources

• Apify Pricing
• Puppeteer Official Site