Apify vs Phantombuster. When to use which?

In this article, I will be comparing 2 of my favorite tools: Phantombuster and Apify. Both are great automation tools relying on webscraping under the hook but depending on your use case, one will be better than the other. It is even sometimes relevant to combine both tools. It is all about the use case, so let’s dig in.

Where Phantombust shines

Social login management

The main advantage of Phantombuster is its Chrome extension. It makes it easy to share your social credentials with Phantombuster.

The Phantombuster Chrome extension will monitor cookies. In case your cookies are chante the extension will update your Phantombuster setting automatically. Thanks to this, your automation will be stable.

Phantombuster will be the go-to for any automation requiring social logins:

• Extracting followers of your Linkedin company page (which requires to be admin of the page)
• Check the connection degree of some leads (with profile scraper or search export)
• Get a list of people who view your profile (that requires a sales navigator subscription)
• Export attendees for a LinkedIn event
• Automate LinkedIn outreach, like sending connection requests and InMail

User interface

Phantombuster also has an easier user interface.

Apify has a realy steep learning curve, and its user interface can be intimidating at first glance.

The complexity is even reflected in the naming: with Apify you will have to run everything from “Apify console”, so you can claim to be a hacker running things from console:

Interestingly, according to Capterra review, Apify is better than Phantombuster in terms of “Ease to use”:

It might be a matter of learning curves. Apify UI is more flexible than Phantombuster’s one, but it takes time to get used to it.

Quality consistency

Another plus of Phantombuster is the Quality consistency. All Phantoms you can see listed on Phantombuster are developed and maintained by their core team.

That ensures that all Phantoms and Automations are consistent in terms of quality. You will also have some consistency in terms of user interface; for example, “the watcher mode” option will behave similarly for all Phantoms offering it.

It is possible to develop a custom Phantom for Phantombuster, but they won’t appear on the Phantombuster home page. You will need to know the URL of the Phantom to access it. This the case for example of my |SSI tracker](https://www.tetriz.io/tool/ssi-tracker/) and Profile visit phantoms

Where Apify shines

Store coverage

Apify, on the other hand, will shine with the variety of automation available. Apify store offers more than 10000 actors.

However, this variety comes with inconsistency in quality. Some actors are purely documented, and some will not behave as documented…

Thankfully, Apify has a free plan offering $5 credits per month. This is usually enough to test out the quality of an actor.

Pricing

That brings me to the second advantage of Apify over Phantombuster: Pricing.

Apify has a free plan which is realy useful for testing and experimentation.

Phantombuster has only a free trial, and it is highly limited. For example, you cannot download more than 10 results per phantom during your free trial.

Once you move to paid plans, Apify has more affordable plans starting at $29 vs €69 for Phantombuster. Moreover, Apify doesn’t limit how many automations you can set up at the same time. You can set up and schedule as many actors as you wish. On the other hand, every Phantombuster pricing plan has a Phantom limit.

On the downside, Apify pricing can be a bit hard to understand. Depending on which actor you pick you will have different pricing model. I’m might write doing a full guide about Apify pricing later as it is quite a long topic.

Proxy & scalability

Apify will also shine when it comes to scalability.

With Phantombuster, most automations use your social logins, so you need to run automations at a reasonable scale to keep your social account safe. Phantombuster’s team usually posts one blog post every year with the recommended rate limits.

Apify is built for scale with the option to run actors in parallel and draws from the proxy pool to bypass anti-webscraping limitations. You will be able to find a lot of social media scraper which doesn’t require logging in, like this LinkedIn Profile Scraper.

Integration

Last but not least, Apify has more and better integration options than Phantombuster.

For example, both tools have integration with no-code tools like Zapier, N8N, and Make but Phantombuster often misses an easy way to retrieve results and push them to those no-code tools.

Let’s take Zapier as an example.

• Phantombuster doesn’t have an action item to retrieve the result of a Phantom. You can use the new output trigger, but it will return the data as json which requires a lot of post-processing.
• Apify integration offers a Fetch dataset action to easily retrieve the results of an Actor.

Which tool to pick per use-case

Now that I have summarised the strengths of each, let’s highlight the best use cases for each Phantombuster will be preferable for:

• Any social media scraping requiring a login
• Any social media automation (not only data extraction), like LinkedIn cold outreach

Apify will be preferable for use for:

• Use case requiring scale
• Use case requiring integration with other tools
• Use case requiring data from a Platform not supported by Phantombuster

For example:

• When it comes to generating leads from Google Maps, Apify will be better as it is more scalable and cheaper per lead.
• If you want to monitor LinkedIn job postings and scrape company profiles, Apify will be a better pick. You do not need to log into LinkedIn to access job postings and company profiles, so Apify will give scalability.
• But if you want to run LinkedIn outreach for leads identified by monitoring those job offers, Phantombuster will be a better pick.

This last example led me to my next point: when should you combine Phantombuster and Apify?

Use cases for combining Phantombuster and Apify

There are a few edge cases where you want to have both tools.

I mentioned above one example where you use Apify scalability to find leads, but then leverage Phantombuster run the cold outreach.

There are multiple use cases where you will use Apify to mine leads:

• Scrape Google search for keywords like “alternative to [your client name]”
• Scrape attendees of luma event
• Scrape G2 to identify a potential tool to integrate with

In all those usecases you will just need to push data from Phantombuster to Apify. This is relatively easy, as any Phantom can get input from a Google Sheet, so you just need to move data from Apify to google sheet. You can use the Google Sheet export actor to do so.

Another case for combining Phantombuster and Apify is: use Phantombuster to get some information requiring social media logging, use Apify to enrich this information without stretching your social media limits.

For example, you can use Phantombuster to extract a list of people who visited your LinkedIn profiles. You could also use Phantombuster to scrape each profile, but that will use your LinkedIn login and could lower the scale at which you can run other automation for your LinkedIn account.

The solution to scale this workflow is to :

• Use Phantombuster to extract a list of those who visited your LinkedIn profile
• Use an Apify actor to scrape each profile without requiring any login.

To implement such a workflow, you will need to push data from Phantombuster to Apify. I actually developed an actor for it.s

Related reading

Full review of Phantombuster Full review of Apify Preparing a Peerlist launch (which showcases how to use both tools)

FAQ

Which is better for LinkedIn automation? PantomBuster or Apify?

If you want to automate things like sending connection requests, or inmail Phantombuster will be better.

Phantombuster Chrome extension will ensure your cookies are always up to date for your automation to be stable

Which is better for LinkedIn data extraction? PantomBuster or Apify?

For any data point that doesn’t require login, Apify will be better as it tends to be cheaper and more scalable.

For a data point hidden behind a login, like the list of followers of your company, Phantombuster will be preferable.

Is it better to develop a scraper on Apify or PhantomBuster?

Apify offers better monetisation options for developers as you can list your actor on the Apify store. Phantombuster is worse considering, if you will be developing a scraper for Linkedin, Twitter, or Instagram.

You will be able to use data from Phantombuster’s Chrome extension, which is a user-friendly way to deal with account credentials.