Data scraping tools are the need in the 21st century as we approach a world where data is the fuel for every domain.
Throughout my career, I’ve tried and tested different web scraping software. Some of these website scraping tools were trash (don’t worry I haven’t included them in this post), while others were the real deal.
If you don’t want to waste your time hopping around for the best web scraping tool, then keep reading because in this post you’ll learn which online web scraper is best for your needs.
But before diving into some of the most popular web data scraping tools, let’s understand what web scraping is.
What Web Scraping is & Use Cases of Scraping Tools
Web scraping is the art of extracting or harvesting data through web pages via different means. The data pulled is then put in a format that is more understandable to the end user.
Use Cases of Web Scraping
- Lead Generation
- SEO
- Market Trends
- Sports Betting Odd Analysis
- Price Comparison
- Academic Research
- Real Estate Data Collection
And many more!! There could be endless use cases of web scraping. Each industry can leverage maximum when they extract data from their niche market.
Want to know more about web scraping? Read this article that explains web scraping from scratch!!
List of Top 13 Web Scraping Tools
Scrapingdog
Scrapingdog is a very high-end web data scraping program that provides millions of proxies for scraping. It offers data scraping services with capabilities like rendering JavaScript & bypassing captchas. Scrapingdog offers two kinds of solutions:
- Software is built for users with less technical knowledge. As you can see in the above image you can manually adjust almost anything from rendering JavaScript to handling premium proxies. This software also provides structured data in JSON format if you specify particular tags & attributes of the data you are trying to scrape.
- API is built for developers. You will be able to scrape websites by just mentioning queries inside the API URI. You can read its documentation here. Their interactive API makes them one of the best scrapers out there in the market right now.
Pros
- Provide a generous free pack with 1000 API calls.
- Scraper is the fastest in the market.
- The success rate for major websites like amazon.com is close to 99%.
Cons
- Suitable for users with little to advanced knowledge of programming. Non-developers cannot use Scrapingdog.
Overall Rating
9/10
ScraperAPI
ScraperAPI is another online web scraper that can help you scrape any website in just a single GET request. They also provide datacenter and residential proxies. If you have your own scraper then you can use those proxies to avoid getting blocked while scraping at scale. You can use their free version to test how it works for your purpose.
Pros
- Provides a free pack with 5000 API calls.
- The documentation is available in multiple languages.
- Great Support
Cons
- Up-time is very poor. Randomly server keeps crashing.
- Scraping websites like amazon, indeed, etc are quite expensive. Scraping these will cost you 5 scraping credits per page.
- Does not work on many websites like indeed, google, etc.
Overall Rating
6.5/10
Know More: Why Scrapingdog is Better Alternative for ScraperAPI.
Scrapingbee
Scrapingbee is one of the most popular web scraping tools at present. It can help you scrape any website with ease. You can scroll down, take complete page screenshots, etc. It is a feature-loaded web scraping API. They too provide a free version and it comes with 1000 API credits.
Pros
- Works great with websites that are hard to scrape.
- Provides great beginner tutorials and a knowledge base.
- Documentation is large and informative
Cons
- Random crashes can break your scraper.
- Pricing is very high as compared to other similar products.
- Support is not that great. If you need instant support then it would not be possible.
Overall Rating
8.5/10
BrightData
Brightdata is the biggest proxy provider in the market. They have general web scraping APIs and dedicated scraping APIs for multiple domains, proxies, and whatnot. They were earlier named Luminati. They provide very high-end proxies for your needs & is top-line web scraping software.
Pros
- A very very large pool of datacenter, mobile and residential proxies.
- Dedicated scraper for websites like LinkedIn, yelp, Zillow, etc.
- Highest Success rate while scraping any website.
Cons
- Prices are too high and only high-revenue companies can use them.
- Does not provide a free trial for testing.
- Very poor support.
- The dashboard is very confusing and there is a lag between the front and the backend. Their APIs are not synced properly with the frontend.
Overall Rating
9/10
Mozenda.com
Mozenda is an online web scraper that offers two different kinds of web scrapers for your needs. Downloadable software that allows you to build agents and runs on the cloud, and A managed solution where they make the agents for you.
They do not offer a free version of the software and if you are looking for a version that works on your Mac, you can use Scrapingdog.
Pros
- You can organize data files in many different formats.
- It provides a point and clicks feature for scraping.
- They are in the scraping business since 2008.
Cons
- Very Expensive for small to medium-sized companies.
- The success rate is not up to the mark.
- The interface might be confusing.
Overall Rating
7/10
Parsehub
The nice thing about ParseHub web scraper tool is that it works on multiple platforms, including mac however, the software is not as robust as the others, with a tricky user interface that could be better streamlined.
Well, I must say it is dead simple to use and exports JSON or excel sheets of the data you are interested in by just clicking on it. It offers a free pack where you can scrape 200 pages in just 40 minutes.
Pros
- The tool can be used by non-developers as well.
- Provide email funnel for the sales team
- RegEx support for clean data.
Cons
- Pricing can be a little intimidating.
- API is too slow while scraping e-commerce websites.
- Not enough credits for testing.
Overall Rating
8/10
Diffbot.com
Diffbot has been transitioning away from a traditional website scraping tool to selling prefinished lists also known as their knowledge graph. There are pricing is competitive, and their support team is very helpful, but oftentimes the data output is a bit convoluted.
I must say that Diffbot is the most different type of scraping tool. Even if the page’s HTML code changes, this tool will not stop impressing you.
Pros
- Provide enough credits for testing
- Build data feeds using the extracted data
- Data can be converted into a structured database. Ex: Price Tracking
Cons
- The price is too high for new companies or individuals. Only for Enterprise.
- Documentation is not clear
Overall Rating
9/10
Import.io
Import grew very quickly with a free version and a promise that the software would always be free. Today they no longer offer a free version, and that caused their popularity to wane. The reviews at capterra.com have the lowest reviews in the data extraction category for this top 10 list.
Most of the complaints are about support and service. They are starting to move from a pure web scraping platform into a scraping and data wrangling operation. They might be making a last-ditch move to survive.
Pros
- It is a done-for-you product that can be used for price monitoring.
- Can easily scrape millions of e-commerce pages.
- Backed by a great experience team.
Cons
- The price is not clear.
- Developers might not like it due to the absence of proper docs and a free trial.
Overall Rating
6/10
Zyte (formerly ScarpingHub)
Scrapinghub claims that they transform websites into usable data with industry-leading technology. Their solutions are “Data on Demand“ for big and small scraping projects with precise and reliable data feeds at very fast rates. They offer lead data extraction and have a team of web scraping engineers. They also offer IP Proxy management to scrape data quickly.
Pros
- Provides APIs, Proxies, and done-for-you solutions.
- API has a great success rate.
- Documentation is very structured.
Cons
- Proxies are slow compared to APIs.
- Pricing is a little over the expensive side
Overall Rating
9/10
Octoparse
Octoparse is a web scraping software for those who either hate coding or have no idea of it. It features a point and clicks screen scraper, allowing users to scrape behind login forms, fill in forms, input search terms, scroll through the infinite scroll, render javascript, and more. It provides a FREE pack with which you can build up to 10 crawlers.
Pros
- Point and click feature for web scraping.
- Download data in CSV, txt or even save it to any DB of your choice.
- Scraped data can be saved on Octoparse DBs.
Cons
- This product is not suitable for developers.
- Too much time taking if you have big data demands.
Overall Rating
8/10
Webharvy
WebHarvy is an interesting company that showed up as a highly used scraping tool. This scraping tool is quite cheap and should be considered if you are working on some small projects.
Using this tool, you can handle logins, signup & even form submissions. You can crawl multiple pages within minutes.
Pros
- Point-and-click tool for scraping.
- Scrape data from search engines by just submitting a set of keywords.
- It can handle pagination automatically.
- Provide regular expression support.
Cons
- The interface is too outdated.
- Support is not that great.
Overall Rating
9/10
80legs
80legs has been around for many years. They have a stable platform and a very fast crawler. The parsing is not the strongest, but if you need a lot of simple queries, fast, 80legs can deliver. You should be warned that 80legs have been used for DDOS attacks, and while the crawler is robust, it has taken down many sites in the past.
You can even customize the web crawlers to make them suitable for your scrapers. You can customize what data gets scraped and which links are followed from each URL crawled. Enter one or more (up to several thousand) URLs you want to crawl.
These are the URLs where the web crawl will start. Links from these URLs will be followed automatically, depending on the settings of your web crawl. 80legs will post results as the web crawl runs. Once the crawl has finished, all of the results will be available, and you can download them to your computer or local environment.
Pros
- You can run your own crawlers on their servers.
- Store scraped data on their servers.
- Already scraped data available.
Cons
- The data collection process is time-consuming.
- Sometimes it struggles to scrape even the simplest of websites.
- The product definition is not clear.
Overall Rating
4/10
Grepsr
Grepsr can help you with Lead generation programs, news aggregation, financial data collection, competitive data collection, etc. The pricing looks good and can be used for small projects. Because web scraping projects are often complicated with various layers of details and requirements, they have built a communication doorway called ‘Messages’ for each of your projects. Messages are to issue tickets, discuss requirements, and track project status from a single place.
Pros
- Provides done for you solution
- Experts when it comes to data collection for real estate and eCommerce.
- Great customer support.
Cons
- Pricing is not clear or fixed.
Overall Rating
9/10
What to Consider Before Choosing the Web Scraping Software/Tools
What sort of data would you like to collect?
Before web scraping for your business needs, you should determine what kind of data you want to analyze.
This is necessary because the methods you employ for data collection will vary based on the Data Format you want.
Check what format the data from your target website is in and organize it into a usable format.
How fast do you need the data to be collected?
Another determining factor in choosing the right web data scraping tool is the speed of data collection. If you project that you need the data at a certain speed, examine what your current reaction time will be.
Check the latency of different tools, and pick the one whose pricing and response time suit your needs.
How big is the delay in the data collection process?
It is crucial to make sure that there is no significant time gap in data collection.
The tool you have should be able to complete the scraping project quickly enough so as not to miss key details that may come up. Allowing for a considerable delay in data collection can potentially cause you to miss opportunities that you may have otherwise been able to exploit.
What is the level of your technical expertise?
If you are relatively new to the technical aspects of web scraping, consider using tools that have a lower learning curve. These will likely be tools that allow you to use point-and-click gestures with a GUI interface to extract data more easily from web pages.
How much are you willing to spend?
The price of a tool has to be weighed against the benefits it provides. Choose a website scraping tool that strikes a balance between price and functionality based on your project requirements and the features you need.
What is the competency of the vendor based on customer support?
Vendors offer various levels of customer support. As a buyer, you should always make sure that the vendor you are working with offers the best customer support possible. Examine the various customer support channels a vendor provides and gauge the quality of customer support they offer.
Conclusion
Web scraping has become an essential part of many businesses and organizations in today’s digital world. The process of web scraping allows firms to automatically extract data from websites, making it a quick and efficient way to gather information.
There are a number of online web scrapers available, each with its own pros and cons. The mentioned web scraping tools help you make an informed decision about which one is right for your business needs. With that, we end our list of best web scraping programs available in the market today!!
There are more web scraping companies that offer web scraping as a service, however, that was beyond the scope of this blog.
