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Apify alternative for social media counts

Updated

Apify will absolutely get you a follower count. It will also get you everything else on the page, for almost any site, in any shape you like, provided you pick a scraper, configure the run, handle the output, and own the care and feeding of that pipeline from then on. Whether that is a feature or a chore depends entirely on the job.

What Apify is built for

Apify is a general web scraping platform with a marketplace of thousands of ready-made scrapers built by Apify and third-party developers, plus the infrastructure to run them: scheduling, storage, proxies. For arbitrary extraction problems it is a serious tool, and social media scrapers are among its most popular.

Where Metrika fits instead

Scraping social platforms is genuinely fiddly. We know, because it is what Metrika does all day: markup drifts, login walls come and go, and a parser that worked on Monday returns nothing on Thursday. With Metrika, none of that is your problem. We collect public counts into a snapshot refreshed daily, and your request reads the latest value through one stable contract, no runs to trigger and no output schema of your own to maintain.

bash 
$ curl -X POST https://metrika.run/api/v1/resources/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"resources": [{"platform": "threads", "type": "account", "identifier": "zuck"}, {"platform": "x", "type": "account", "identifier": "nasa"}]}'
json 
{
  "data": [
    {
      "platform": "threads",
      "type": "account",
      "identifier": "zuck",
      "status": "available",
      "metrics": {
        "followers": { "value": 6200000, "status": "available" }
      }
    }
  ]
}

When Apify is the better choice

When you need data we do not hold. Metrika collects follower count, following count, post count, and verified status for the platforms it supports, where each provides them, and nothing else: no post content, no comments, no engagement, no other websites. A scraper you operate can collect whatever you can parse, whenever you trigger it, which also makes it the right tool if a daily snapshot is not fresh enough for your use case.

Getting started

The free tier includes up to 500 API requests per month with no credit card required. Create an account, generate an API key from your dashboard, and the docs cover authentication and response formats.

Get started with Metrika

Create a free account and start pulling social media datapoints in minutes. The free tier includes 500 requests per month, no credit card required.

Create a free account Read the docs See pricing