Apify announces MCP connectors

With MCP connectors, Apify Actors can now securely connect to external apps like Notion, GitHub, and Slack with the user’s own account.

PRAGUE —  Apify has launched MCP connectors, a new way for its Actors to securely connect to external apps like Notion, GitHub, and Slack with the user’s own account. Once a connector is assigned, an Actor can access the user’s data in those apps, send results back, or run workflows across them, all without ever seeing the account credentials.

Background

Apify Actors are tools that do a job on the web. Historically, most have worked on the open web, without any login or user account, fetching public data from all kinds of websites. That anonymous data collection is usually just the first step of more complex workflows, which often interact with external apps under a login. Until now, these workflows had to run outside Apify, because it was difficult to give Actors authenticated access to external applications.

With MCP connectors, Actors can now securely access third-party applications through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard for agent-to-tool interaction. MCP is supported by a growing ecosystem of services, including Postgres, Git, Google Calendar, and Slack.

“For years, Apify Actors have been extracting public data from the open web. With MCP connectors, they get new hands to act on the outer world, securely connecting to the apps people already use to get real work done,” said Jan Curn, CEO and founder of Apify.

How connectors work

MCP connectors are a new kind of input for Actors. In Apify Console, users select an existing connector or add a new one by entering a URL and authenticating to a remote MCP server. Once the Actor starts, it can access that server through the connector and call its tools. For example, an Actor can scrape product reviews, analyze sentiment, and create a database entry in Notion, all in a single run.

Security considerations

MCP connectors give Actors access to external applications on behalf of the connected account, so an Actor acts with that account’s permissions. A user must manually assign each connector to an Actor in Console, and access can be limited to specific tools. Actors never get access to the underlying credentials or authentication tokens.

Availability

MCP connectors are available now to all Apify users. To get started:

– Read the documentation: https://docs.apify.com/platform/integrations/mcp-connectors

– Browse Actors that support connectors in Apify Store: https://apify.com/store/collections/mcp-connectors

– See more examples in the launch announcement on the Apify blog: https://blog.apify.com/announcing-mcp-connectors/

The Apify team invites creators to build with the feature and share feedback on Discord.

About Apify

Apify (https://apify.com) is the largest marketplace of trusted tools for AI. Thousands of Actors automate work on the web: real-time data extraction, competitor tracking, lead generation, social media monitoring, and app and agent integration. Actors are created by a global community of builders who earn more than $1M every month. Apify manages infrastructure, billing, and distribution, and is SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, and CCPA compliant, with 99.95% uptime. Apify is a member of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), the Linux Foundation body that hosts the Model Context Protocol.

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The Apify team

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