Make vs Apify: Which Should You Try First to Add Web Data to Your AI Agent?

AgentStack Notes — Sun, 08 Nov 2026 02:37:14 +0000

Originally published at AgentStack Notes. Last fact-checked: November 7, 2026.

Disclosure: This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked against each platform's official pages. It may contain affiliate links; we have applied to the affiliate programs mentioned below and the applications are pending, so today every link goes to the official sites, not to tracked referral links. If that changes and we earn a commission, it costs you nothing extra. See our Advertising Disclosure.

If you're building an AI agent or an automated workflow and you've hit the point where it needs to pull data from the live web, you've probably run into two names over and over: Make (a no-code automation hub) and Apify (a web-scraping and browser-automation platform). They get mentioned in the same breath so often that it's easy to assume they're interchangeable. They aren't, and picking the wrong one first can cost you a week of rebuilding your workflow.

This guide compares them on the two things that actually decide which one you should try first: what each one is built to do, and what it costs you to find that out.

Note on experience: we have hands-on, daily experience running browser automation and web-scraping workloads (headless browsers, CDP-level control, anti-bot handling) as part of real automation projects. We have not personally run production workloads on Make or Apify specifically. Everything below about their features, pricing, and affiliate terms is sourced directly from their official documentation and pricing pages (linked throughout, checked November 7, 2026) — not from first-hand testing of these two platforms. Treat the general automation judgment as experience-based, and the platform-specific numbers as citation-based.

1. What each tool is actually for

Make is a general-purpose, no-code automation hub. You connect apps (Gmail, Notion, Slack, your CRM, a webhook from your AI agent, and so on) with a visual flowchart-style builder, and it runs the whole chain for you. Web scraping is one module you can drop into a larger flow — it is not the product's center of gravity.

Apify is built specifically around collecting data from the web and running browser automation at scale. It ships as a marketplace of pre-built "Actors" (ready-made scrapers for sites like Google Search, Instagram, Amazon, etc.) plus an SDK if you want to write your own. If your agent's core job is "go get this data from the web," Apify is closer to a purpose-built tool for that job.

A simple way to decide: if you need to orchestrate a multi-step workflow where web data is one ingredient among several (trigger → scrape → summarize with an LLM → post to Slack), Make's visual builder will likely get you there faster. If the web data collection itself is the hard part (JavaScript-heavy sites, anti-bot measures, pagination at scale, proxy rotation), Apify's purpose-built Actors and infrastructure are the more direct fit.

2. What it costs to actually try them

	Make	Apify
Free plan price	$0/month	$0/month
Free plan allowance	1,000 credits/month (official pricing page)	$5 of platform usage/month, metered at $0.20 per Compute Unit (official pricing page)
Free plan concurrency limit	Not stated on the pricing page we checked	5 concurrent runs (official pricing page)
Cheapest paid plan	Not confirmed on the page we checked — third-party sources cite roughly $9–$12/month, unverified against the official page	Starter: $19/month ($17/month billed annually) (official pricing page)

Both free plans are real free plans (not trials), but they are structured differently. Make counts every action in your flow as a "credit" — a flow with many steps eats through 1,000 credits faster than you'd expect. Apify's free plan is a $5/month usage credit metered per Compute Unit, so the real question is how much CPU/RAM-time your specific scraping job burns, which varies a lot by target site and Actor.

Practical takeaway: if you want to test a single, well-defined scraping task, Apify's $5 free usage is a more predictable way to find your actual cost per run. If you want to test an end-to-end workflow with several apps involved, Make's 1,000 free credits/month lets you build and run the whole chain before paying anything.

3. What you'd be signing up for as an affiliate (if you later want to recommend one)

Since this site covers both building with these tools and the economics of recommending them, here's what each program's official terms say, as of November 7, 2026:

Make Affiliate Program: 35% commission on referred subscription payments for 12 months from signup. Payout requires a minimum of $100 and 3 unique paying referred users in the same period; paid exclusively via Wise. No stated application review — any Make account holder can join.
Apify Affiliate Program: 20% of a referred customer's payments for their first 3 months, then 30% after that, capped at $2,500 per referred customer (higher cap for affiliates with 50+ active referrals). Monthly payout minimum is $100 (rolls over if unmet), plus a cumulative 3 paid referrals requirement. Paid via PayPal, bank transfer, or Wise, within 15 business days of month-end.

Neither program's official pages state a residency restriction, but neither confirms unrestricted eligibility either — if you're applying from outside the US/EU, confirm directly with each program before counting on approval.

4. Who each one suits

Try Make first if: your AI agent needs to talk to several other apps and services, web data is just one piece of a bigger chain, and you'd rather drag-and-drop a flow than write scraping logic.

Try Apify first if: the core problem is reliably getting structured data off of specific, possibly JavaScript-heavy or anti-bot-protected sites, and you're willing to work with (or write) purpose-built Actors to do it.

Try neither yet if: the site you need data from has a documented public API. Several experienced scrapers (see the Indie Hackers thread we reviewed while researching this) recommend checking for a usable backend API before reaching for any scraping tool — it's cheaper and far more stable than parsing HTML.

5. What we haven't verified yet

To keep this article honest about its own limits:

We have not independently load-tested either platform's reliability at scale.
Make's paid-tier pricing above the free plan is not confirmed from Make's own pricing page in this pass — treat the $9–$12/month figures as third-party estimates until verified directly.
Neither affiliate program's official pages confirm a residency restriction or cookie/attribution window; both are marked "unconfirmed" pending direct contact with each program.