Best Web Crawler
Top 20 web crawler tools to scrape the websites – Big Data …
Web crawling (also known as web scraping) is a process in which a program or automated script browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner and targets at fetching new or updated data from any websites and store the data for easy access. Web crawler tools are very popular these days as they have simplified and automated the entire crawling process and made the data crawling easy and accessible to everyone. In this post, we will look at the top 20 popular web crawlers around the web. 1. Cyotek WebCopyWebCopy is a free website crawler that allows you to copy partial or full websites locally into your hard disk for offline will scan the specified website before downloading the website content onto your hard disk and auto-remap the links to resources like images and other web pages in the site to match its local path, excluding a section of the website. Additional options are also available such as downloading a URL to include in the copy, but not crawling are many settings you can make to configure how your website will be crawled, in addition to rules and forms mentioned above, you can also configure domain aliases, user agent strings, default documents and ever, WebCopy does not include a virtual DOM or any form of JavaScript parsing. If a website makes heavy use of JavaScript to operate, it is unlikely WebCopy will be able to make a true copy if it is unable to discover all the website due to JavaScript being used to dynamically generate links. 2. HTTrackAs a website crawler freeware, HTTrack provides functions well suited for downloading an entire website from the Internet to your PC. It has provided versions available for Windows, Linux, Sun Solaris, and other Unix systems. It can mirror one site, or more than one site together (with shared links). You can decide the number of connections to opened concurrently while downloading web pages under “Set options”. You can get the photos, files, HTML code from the entire directories, update current mirrored website and resume interrupted, Proxy support is available with HTTTrack to maximize speed, with optional Track Works as a command-line program, or through a shell for both private (capture) or professional (on-line web mirror) use. With that saying, HTTrack should be preferred and used more by people with advanced programming skills. 3. OctoparseOctoparse is a free and powerful website crawler used for extracting almost all kind of data you need from the website. You can use Octoparse to rip a website with its extensive functionalities and capabilities. There are two kinds of learning mode – Wizard Mode and Advanced Mode – for non-programmers to quickly get used to Octoparse. After downloading the freeware, its point-and-click UI allows you to grab all the text from the website and thus you can download almost all the website content and save it as a structured format like EXCEL, TXT, HTML or your advanced, it has provided Scheduled Cloud Extraction which enables you to refresh the website and get the latest information from the you could extract many tough websites with difficult data block layout using its built-in Regex tool, and locate web elements precisely using the XPath configuration tool. You will not be bothered by IP blocking anymore since Octoparse offers IP Proxy Servers that will automate IP’s leaving without being detected by aggressive conclude, Octoparse should be able to satisfy users’ most crawling needs, both basic or high-end, without any coding skills. 4. GetleftGetleft is a free and easy-to-use website grabber that can be used to rip a website. It downloads an entire website with its easy-to-use interface and multiple options. After you launch the Getleft, you can enter a URL and choose the files that should be downloaded before begin downloading the website. While it goes, it changes the original pages, all the links get changed to relative links, for local browsing. Additionally, it offers multilingual support, at present Getleft supports 14 languages. However, it only provides limited Ftp supports, it will download the files but not recursively. Overall, Getleft should satisfy users’ basic crawling needs without more complex tactical skills. 5. ScraperThe scraper is a Chrome extension with limited data extraction features but it’s helpful for making online research, and exporting data to Google Spreadsheets. This tool is intended for beginners as well as experts who can easily copy data to the clipboard or store to the spreadsheets using OAuth. The scraper is a free web crawler tool, which works right in your browser and auto-generates smaller XPaths for defining URLs to crawl. It may not offer all-inclusive crawling services, but novices also needn’t tackle messy configurations. 6. OutWit HubOutWit Hub is a Firefox add-on with dozens of data extraction features to simplify your web searches. This web crawler tool can browse through pages and store the extracted information in a proper Hub offers a single interface for scraping tiny or huge amounts of data per needs. OutWit Hub lets you scrape any web page from the browser itself and even create automatic agents to extract data and format it per is one of the simplest web scraping tools, which is free to use and offers you the convenience to extract web data without writing a single line of code. 7. ParseHubParsehub is a great web crawler that supports collecting data from websites that use AJAX technologies, JavaScript, cookies etc. Its machine learning technology can read, analyze and then transform web documents into relevant desktop application of Parsehub supports systems such as Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, or you can use the web app that is built within the a freeware, you can set up no more than five public projects in Parsehub. The paid subscription plans allow you to create at least 20 private projects for scraping websites. 8. Visual ScraperVisualScraper is another great free and non-coding web scraper with a simple point-and-click interface and could be used to collect data from the web. You can get real-time data from several web pages and export the extracted data as CSV, XML, JSON or SQL files. Besides the SaaS, VisualScraper offers web scraping service such as data delivery services and creating software extractors Scraper enables users to schedule their projects to be run on a specific time or repeat the sequence every minute, days, week, month, year. Users could use it to extract news, updates, forum frequently. 9. ScrapinghubScrapinghub is a cloud-based data extraction tool that helps thousands of developers to fetch valuable data. Its open source visual scraping tool, allows users to scrape websites without any programming rapinghub uses Crawlera, a smart proxy rotator that supports bypassing bot counter-measures to crawl huge or bot-protected sites easily. It enables users to crawl from multiple IPs and locations without the pain of proxy management through a simple HTTP rapinghub converts the entire web page into organized content. Its team of experts is available for help in case its crawl builder can’t work your requirements. 10. a browser-based web crawler, allows you to scrape data based on your browser from any website and provide three types of the robot for you to create a scraping task – Extractor, Crawler, and Pipes. The freeware provides anonymous web proxy servers for your web scraping and your extracted data will be hosted on ’s servers for two weeks before the data is archived, or you can directly export the extracted data to JSON or CSV files. It offers paid services to meet your needs for getting real-time data. 11. enables users to get real-time data from crawling online sources from all over the world into various, clean formats. This web crawler enables you to crawl data and further extract keywords in many different languages using multiple filters covering a wide array of you can save the scraped data in XML, JSON and RSS formats. And users can access the history data from its Archive. Plus, supports at most 80 languages with its crawling data results. And users can easily index and search the structured data crawled by, could satisfy users’ elementary crawling requirements. 12. Import. ioUsers can form their own datasets by simply importing the data from a web page and exporting the data to can easily scrape thousands of web pages in minutes without writing a single line of code and build 1000+ APIs based on your requirements. Public APIs has provided powerful and flexible capabilities to control programmatically and gain automated access to the data, has made crawling easier by integrating web data into your own app or website with just a few better serve users’ crawling requirements, it also offers a free app for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux to build data extractors and crawlers, download data and sync with the online account. Plus, users can schedule crawling tasks weekly, daily or hourly. 13. 80legs80legs is a powerful web crawling tool that can be configured based on customized requirements. It supports fetching huge amounts of data along with the option to download the extracted data instantly. 80legs provides high-performance web crawling that works rapidly and fetches required data in mere seconds14. Spinn3rSpinn3r allows you to fetch entire data from blogs, news & social media sites and RSS & ATOM feed. Spinn3r is distributed with a firehouse API that manages 95% of the indexing work. It offers advanced spam protection, which removes spam and inappropriate language uses, thus improving data safety. Spinn3r indexes content like Google and save the extracted data in JSON files. The web scraper constantly scans the web and finds updates from multiple sources to get you real-time publications. Its admin console lets you control crawls and full-text search allows making complex queries on raw data. 15. Content GrabberContent Graber is a web crawling software targeted at enterprises. It allows you to create a stand-alone web crawling agents. It can extract content from almost any website and save it as structured data in a format of your choice, including Excel reports, XML, CSV, and most is more suitable for people with advanced programming skills, since it offers many powerful scripting editing, debugging interfaces for people in need. Users can use C# or to debug or write the script to control the crawling programming. For example, Content Grabber can integrate with Visual Studio 2013 for the most powerful script editing, debugging and unit test for an advanced and tactful customized crawler based on users’ particular needs. 16. Helium ScraperHelium Scraper is a visual web data crawling software that works well when the association between elements is small. It’s non-coding, non-configuration. And users can get access to the online templates based for various crawling needs. Basically, it could satisfy users’ crawling needs within an elementary level. 17. UiPathUiPath is a robotic process automation software for free web scraping. It automates web and desktop data crawling out of most third-party Apps. You can install the robotic process automation software if you run a Windows system. Uipath can extract tabular and pattern-based data across multiple web has provided the built-in tools for further crawling. This method is very effective when dealing with complex UIs. The Screen Scraping Tool can handle both individual text elements, groups of text and blocks of text, such as data extraction in table, no programming is needed to create intelligent web agents, but the hacker inside you will have complete control over the data. 18. Scrape. is a web scraping software for humans. It’s a cloud-based web data extraction tool. It’s designed towards those with advanced programming skills, since it has offered both public and private packages to discover, reuse, update, and share code with millions of developers worldwide. Its powerful integration will help you build a customized crawler based on your needs. 19. WebHarvyWebHarvy is a point-and-click web scraping software. It’s designed for non-programmers. WebHarvy can automatically scrape Text, Images, URLs & Emails from websites, and save the scraped content in various formats. It also provides built-in scheduler and proxy support which enables anonymously crawling and prevents the web scraping software from being blocked by web servers, you have the option to access target websites via proxy servers or can save the data extracted from web pages in a variety of formats. The current version of WebHarvy Web Scraper allows you to export the scraped data as an XML, CSV, JSON or TSV file. The user can also export the scraped data to an SQL database. 20. ConnotateConnotate is an automated web crawler designed for Enterprise-scale web content extraction which needs an enterprise-scale solution. Business users can easily create extraction agents in as little as minutes – without any programming. The user can easily create extraction agents simply by can automatically extract over 95% of sites without programming, including complex JavaScript-based dynamic site technologies, such as Ajax. And Connotate supports any language for data crawling from most ditionally, Connotate also offers the function to integrate webpage and database content, including content from SQL databases and MongoDB for database added to the list:21. Netpeak SpiderNetpeak Spider is a desktop tool for day-to-day SEO audit, quick search for issues, systematic analysis, and website program specializes in the analysis of large websites (we’re talking about millions of pages) with optimal use of RAM. You can simply import the data from web crawling and export the data to tpeak Spider allows you to scrape custom search of source code/text according to the 4 types of search: ‘Contains’, ‘RegExp’, ‘CSS Selector’, or ‘XPath’. A tool is useful for scraping for emails, names, etc.
10 Best Open Source Web Scraper in 2021 | Octoparse
What is a web scraper?
A web scraper (also known as web crawler) is a tool or a piece of code that performs the process to extract data from web pages on the Internet. Various web scrapers have played an important role in the boom of big data and make it easy for people to scrape the data they need.
Why open-source web scrapers?
Among various web scrapers, open-source web scrapers allow users to code based on their source code or framework, and fuel a massive part to help scrape in a fast, simple but extensive way.
What are the top 10 open source web scrapers?
We will walk through the top 10 open source web scrapers (open source web crawler) in 2021.
1. Scrapy
2. Heritrix
3. Web-Harvest
4. MechanicalSoup
5. Apify SDK
6. Apache Nutch
7. Jaunt
8. Node-crawler
9. PySpider
10. StormCrawler
1. Scrapy
Language: Python
Scrapy is the most popular open-source web crawler and collaborative web scraping tool in Python. It helps to extract data efficiently from websites, processes them as you need, and stores them in your preferred format(JSON, XML, and CSV). It’s built on top of a twisted asynchronous networking framework that can accept requests and process them faster. With Scrapy, you’ll be able to handle large web scraping projects in an efficient and flexible way.
Advantages:
Fast and powerful
Easy to use with detailed documentation
Ability to plug new functions without having to touch the core
A healthy community and abundant resources
Cloud environment to run the scrapers
Language: JAVA
Heritrix is a JAVA-based open-source scraper with high extensibility and is designed for web archiving. It highly respects the exclusion directives and Meta robot tags and collects data at a measured, adaptive pace unlikely to disrupt normal website activities. It provides a web-based user interface accessible with a web browser for operator control and monitoring of crawls.
Replaceable pluggable modules
Web-based interface
With respect to the and Meta robot tags
Excellent extensibility
3. Web-Harvest
Web-Harvest is an open-source scraper written in Java. It can collect useful data from specified pages. In order to do that, it mainly leverages techniques and technologies such as XSLT, XQuery, and Regular Expressions to operate or filter content from HTML/XML based web sites. It could be easily supplemented by custom Java libraries to augment its extraction capabilities.
Powerful text and XML manipulation processors for data handling and control flow
The variable context for storing and using variables
Real scripting languages supported, which can be easily integrated within scraper configurations
MechanicalSoup is a Python library designed to simulate the human’s interaction with websites when using a browser. It was built around Python giants Requests (for sessions) and BeautifulSoup (for document navigation). It automatically stores and sends cookies, follows redirects, and follows links and submits forms. If you try to simulate human behaviors like waiting for a certain event or click certain items rather than just scraping data, MechanicalSoup is really useful.
Ability to simulate human behavior
Blazing fast for scraping fairly simple websites
Support CSS & XPath selectors
5. Apify SDK
Language: JavaScript
Apify SDK is one of the best web scrapers built in JavaScript. The scalable scraping library enables the development of data extraction and web automation jobs with headless Chrome and Puppeteer. With its unique powerful tools like RequestQueue and AutoscaledPool, you can start with several URLs and recursively follow links to other pages and can run the scraping tasks at the maximum capacity of the system respectively.
Scrape with largescale and high performance
Apify Cloud with a pool of proxies to avoid detection
Built-in support of Node. jsplugins like Cheerio and Puppeteer
6. Apache Nutch
Apache Nutch, another open-source scraper coded entirely in Java, has a highly modular architecture, allowing developers to create plug-ins for media-type parsing, data retrieval, querying and clustering. Being pluggable and modular, Nutch also provides extensible interfaces for custom implementations.
Highly extensible and scalable
Obey txt rules
Vibrant community and active development
Pluggable parsing, protocols, storage, and indexing
7. Jaunt
Jaunt, based on JAVA, is designed for web-scraping, web-automation and JSON querying. It offers a fast, ultra-light and headless browser which provides web-scraping functionality, access to the DOM, and control over each HTTP Request/Response, but does not support JavaScript.
Process individual HTTP Requests/Responses
Easy interfacing with REST APIs
Support for HTTP, HTTPS & basic auth
RegEx-enabled querying in DOM & JSON
Node-crawler is a powerful, popular and production web crawler based on It is completely written in and natively supports non-blocking asynchronous I/O, which provides a great convenience for the crawler’s pipeline operation mechanism. At the same time, it supports the rapid selection of DOM, (no need to write regular expressions), and improves the efficiency of crawler development.
Rate control
Different priorities for URL requests
Configurable pool size and retries
Server-side DOM & automatic jQuery insertion with Cheerio (default) or JSDOM
9. PySpider
PySpider is a powerful web crawler system in Python. It has an easy-to-use Web UI and a distributed architecture with components like scheduler, fetcher, and processor. It supports various databases, such as MongoDB and MySQL, for data storage.
Powerful WebUI with a script editor, task monitor, project manager, and result viewer
RabbitMQ, Beanstalk, Redis, and Kombu as the message queue
Distributed architecture
10. StormCrawler
StormCrawler is a full-fledged open-source web crawler. It consists of a collection of reusable resources and components, written mostly in Java. It is used for building low-latency, scalable and optimized web scraping solutions in Java and also is perfectly suited to serve streams of inputs where the URLs are sent over streams for crawling.
Highly scalable and can be used for large scale recursive crawls
Easy to extend with additional libraries
Great thread management which reduces the latency of crawl
Open source web scrapers are quite powerful and extensible but are limited to developers. There are lots of non-coding tools like Octoparse, making scraping no longer only a privilege for developers. If you are not proficient with programming, these tools will be more suitable and make scraping easy for you.
If you’re finding a data service for your project, Octoparse data service is a good choice. We work closely with you to understand your data requirement and make sure we deliver what you desire. Talk to Octoparse data expert now to discuss how web scraping services can help you maximize efforts.
日本語記事：2020年オープンソースWebクローラー10選Webスクレイピングについての記事は 公式サイトでも読むことができます。Artículo en español:10 Mejores Web Scraper de Código Abierto en 2020También puede leer artículos de web scraping en el Website Oficial
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Is web crawling legal? – Towards Data Science
Photo by Sebastian Pichler on UnsplashWeb crawling, also known as web scraping, data scraping or spider, is a computer program technique used to scrape a huge amount of data from websites where regular-format data can be extracted and processed into easy-to-read structured crawling basically is how the internet functions. For example, SEO needs to create sitemaps and gives their permissions to let Google crawl their sites in order to make higher ranks in the search results. Many consultant companies would hire companies to specialize in web scraping to enrich their database so as to provide professional service to their is really hard to determine the legality of web scraping in the era of the digitized crawling can be used in the malicious purpose for example:Scraping private or classified information. Disregard of the website’s terms and service, scrape without owners’ abusive manner of data requests would lead web server crashes under additionally heavy is important to note that a responsible data service provider would refuse your request if:The data is private which would need a username and passcodesThe TOS (Terms of Service) explicitly prohibits the action of web scrapingThe data is copyrightedViolation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)Trespass to “just scraped a website” may cause unexpected consequences if you used it probably heard of the HiQ vs Linkedin case in 2017. HiQ is a data science company that provides scraped data to corporate HR departments. Linkedin then sent desist letter to stop HiQ scraping behavior. HiQ then filed a lawsuit to stop Linkedin from blocking their access. As a result, the court ruled in favor of HiQ. It is because that HiQ scrapes data from the public profiles on Linkedin without logging in. That said, it is perfectly legal to scrape the data which is publicly shared on the ’s take another example to illustrate in what case web scraping can be harmful. The law case eBay v. Bidder’s Edge. If you’re doing web crawling for your own purposes, it is legal as it falls under fair use doctrine. The complications start if you want to use scraped data for others, especially commercial purposes. Quoted from, 100 1058 (N. D. Cal. 2000), was a leading case applying the trespass to chattels doctrine to online activities. In 2000, eBay, an online auction company, successfully used the ‘trespass to chattels’ theory to obtain a preliminary injunction preventing Bidder’s Edge, an auction data aggregation, from using a ‘crawler’ to gather data from eBay’s website. The opinion was a leading case applying ‘trespass to chattels’ to online activities, although its analysis has been criticized in more recent long as you are not crawling at a disruptive rate and the source is public you should be fine. I suggest you check the websites you plan to crawl for any Terms of Service clauses related to scraping their intellectual property. If it says “no scraping or crawling”, you should respect ggestion:Scrape discreetly, check “” before you start scrapingGo conservative. Aggressively asking for data can burden the internet server. An ethical way is to be gentle. No one wants to crash the the data wisely. Don’t duplicate the data. You can generate insight from collected data, and help Your business out to the owner of the website before you start ’t randomly pass scraped data to anyone. If it is valuable data, keep it secure.
Frequently Asked Questions about best web crawler
Can I crawl any website?
If you’re doing web crawling for your own purposes, it is legal as it falls under fair use doctrine. The complications start if you want to use scraped data for others, especially commercial purposes. … As long as you are not crawling at a disruptive rate and the source is public you should be fine.Jul 17, 2019
What is open source crawlers?
A web crawler (also known in other terms like ants, automatic indexers, bots, web spiders, web robots or web scutters) is an automated program, or script, that methodically scans or “crawls” through web pages to create an index of the data it is set to look for. This process is called Web crawling or spidering.Sep 12, 2018
Which software is used for crawling the website?
A Web Crawler is an Internet bot that browses through WWW (World Wide Web), downloads and indexes content. It is widely used to learn each webpage on the web to retrieve information. It is sometimes called a spider bot or spider. The main purpose of it is to index web pages.Oct 7, 2021
