Apify Glossary
Every Apify term explained in plain English. Bookmark this page — it covers the concepts you actually need when building and managing actors.
Actor
An Apify Actor is a serverless cloud program that runs on the Apify platform inside an isolated Docker container.
Read full definition →PPE (Pay Per Event)
Apify PPE (Pay Per Event) is a usage-based pricing model where the actor developer defines billable events and sets the price for each event.
Read full definition →Compute Unit
An Apify Compute Unit (CU) is a measure of computing resources consumed by an actor run, calculated as memory allocated (in GB) multiplied by run duration (in hours).
Read full definition →Dataset
An Apify Dataset is a structured, append-only storage system designed for tabular data produced by actor runs.
Read full definition →Key-Value Store
An Apify Key-Value Store is a flexible storage system for saving and reading data records identified by unique string keys.
Read full definition →Request Queue
An Apify Request Queue is a managed, persistent queue system that stores and prioritizes URLs to be crawled by a web scraping actor.
Read full definition →Proxy
An Apify Proxy is an intermediary server that routes your actor's web requests through different IP addresses, preventing target websites from identifying and blocking your scraper based on IP-based rate limiting or geo-restrictions.
Read full definition →Crawlee
Crawlee is an open-source web scraping and browser automation library for Node.
Read full definition →Cheerio Crawler
Cheerio Crawler (CheerioCrawler) is a Crawlee crawler type that downloads raw HTML using plain HTTP requests and parses it with Cheerio, a fast jQuery-like DOM manipulation library for Node.
Read full definition →Playwright Crawler
Playwright Crawler (PlaywrightCrawler) is a Crawlee crawler type that launches a real Chromium, Firefox, or WebKit browser via Microsoft's Playwright library to render web pages with full JavaScript execution.
Read full definition →MCP Server
An Apify MCP (Model Context Protocol) Server is a specialized actor that exposes Apify actor functionality as callable tools for AI agents, large language models, and AI-powered development environments like Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Windsurf, and VS Code Copilot.
Read full definition →Standby Mode
Apify Standby Mode is a persistent deployment mode where an actor stays running continuously and listens for incoming HTTP requests, behaving like a traditional always-on web server rather than a batch job.
Read full definition →Actor Build
An Apify Actor Build is the process of packaging an actor's source code, dependencies, and configuration into a versioned, immutable Docker image on the Apify platform.
Read full definition →Actor Run
An Apify Actor Run is a single execution of an actor with specific input parameters, representing one complete job from start to finish.
Read full definition →Input Schema
An Apify Input Schema is a JSON Schema file located at .
Read full definition →Dataset Schema
An Apify Dataset Schema is a JSON Schema file at .
Read full definition →Store Quality Score
The Apify Store Quality Score is a numeric score from 0 to 100 that Apify assigns to each published actor based on a comprehensive set of quality criteria.
Read full definition →Maintenance Flag
The Apify Maintenance Flag (UNDER_MAINTENANCE) is a warning state applied to actors that fail Apify's automated quality checks for 3 consecutive days.
Read full definition →Webhook
An Apify Webhook is an HTTP callback that Apify triggers automatically when specific actor events occur, enabling real-time integrations between your actors and external services without polling.
Read full definition →Missing a term?
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