Wick is Now on Apify

April 1, 2026

Wick's browser-grade web fetching is now available on the Apify Store — the marketplace with 22,000+ web scraping and automation tools. You can run it in Apify's cloud without installing anything locally.

Why Apify?

Wick was built to run locally. That's still its strength — your residential IP, your machine, no cloud dependency. But people kept asking for two things Wick doesn't do on its own: scheduled crawls and pipeline integrations.

Apify does both of those well. Their platform handles scheduling, retries, monitoring, and has built-in integrations with Pinecone, Google Sheets, Zapier, LangChain, and dozens of other tools. By putting Wick on their marketplace, you get the best of both worlds: Wick's Chrome TLS fingerprinting with Apify's orchestration.

How it works

The Actor bundles the Wick binary inside a Docker container on Apify's infrastructure. When you start a run, it boots up Wick's HTTP API server and routes your requests through it. Same Cronet engine, same Chrome TLS handshake, same clean markdown output — just running in their cloud instead of your laptop.

{
    "urls": ["https://www.nytimes.com", "https://www.bloomberg.com"],
    "mode": "fetch",
    "format": "markdown"
}

Three modes, same as the local version:

• Fetch — grab one or more pages, get clean markdown back
• Crawl — follow links from a starting URL, configurable depth and page limit
• Map — discover all URLs on a site via sitemap + link following

Performance on Apify's datacenter IPs

The question we had to answer: does Wick's anti-detection work from datacenter IPs, or does it only work because of residential IPs? Here's what we measured:

All real content, no challenge pages, no CAPTCHAs. The TLS fingerprint is doing the heavy lifting — Cronet's handshake is indistinguishable from a real Chrome browser, regardless of the IP it's coming from.

The backstory

Wick's anti-detection technology didn't start with web scraping. It grew out of a decade of building censorship circumvention tools — specifically Lantern, a peer-to-peer system used by millions of people in China, Iran, and Russia to access the open internet.

When you're building tools to bypass national firewalls, you learn what real traffic analysis looks like. State-level censors do deep packet inspection, TLS fingerprinting, and active probing. The techniques Wick uses to look like a real browser to anti-bot systems are the same ones that help people reach blocked websites in the most restrictive countries on earth.

That's why Wick uses Chrome's actual network stack (Cronet) rather than trying to fake it. Faking TLS fingerprints is a cat-and-mouse game. Using the real implementation isn't.

Residential IP mode

The Actor also supports a tunnel mode: connect it to a Wick Pro instance running on your machine, and requests route through your residential IP while Apify handles the scheduling. You get anti-detection + residential IP + cloud orchestration.

Try it

Wick Web Fetcher on Apify Store — free to use, you only pay for Apify compute units.

Or install locally if you prefer:

brew tap wickproject/wick && brew install wick && wick setup

Previous releases

• Wick 0.7: Local HTTP API
• Wick 0.6: Crawl, Map, 100% Success Rate
• Wick 0.5: Media Downloads

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