Website Data Extraction Free
10 FREE Web Scrapers That You Cannot Miss in 2021
How much do you know about web scraping? No worries, this article will brief you on the basics of web scraping, how to access a web scraping tool to get a tool that perfectly matches your needs, and last but not least, present you with a list of web scraping tools for your reference.
Table of Content
Web scraping and how it is used
How to choose a web scraping tool
Three types of web scraping tools
Web Scraping And How It Is Used
Web scraping is a way of gathering data from web pages with a scraping bot, hence the whole process is done in an automated way. The technique allows people to obtain web data at a large scale fast. In the meantime, instruments like Regex (Regular Expression) enable data cleaning during the scraping process, which means people can get well-structured clean data one-stop.
How does web scraping work?
Firstly, a web scraping bot simulates the act of human browsing the website. With the target URL entered, it sends a request to the server and gets information back in the HTML file.
Next, with the HTML source code at hand, the bot is able to reach the node where target data lies and parse the data as it is commanded in the scraping code.
Lastly, (based on how the scraping bot is configured) the cluster of scraped data will be cleaned, put into a structure, and ready for download or transference to your database.
How To Choose A Web Scraping Tool
There are ways to get access to web data. Even though you have narrowed it down to a web scraping tool, tools popped up in the search results with all confusing features still can make a decision hard to reach.
There are a few dimensions you may take into consideration before choosing a web scraping tool:
Device: if you are a Mac or Linux user, you should make sure the tool support your system.
Cloud service: cloud service is important if you want to access your data across devices anytime.
Integration: how you would use the data later on? Integration options enable better automation of the whole process of dealing with data.
Training: if you do not excel at programming, better make sure there are guides and support to help you throughout the data scraping journey.
Pricing: yep, the cost of a tool shall always be taken into consideration and it varies a lot among different venders.
Now you may want to know what web scraping tools to choose from:
Three Types of Scraping Tool
Web Scraper Client
Web Scraping Plugins/Extension
Web-based Scraping Application
There are many free web scraping tools. However, not all web scraping software is for non-programmers. The lists below are the best web scraping tools without coding skills at a low cost. The freeware listed below is easy to pick up and would satisfy most scraping needs with a reasonable amount of data requirement.
Web Scraping Tools Client-based
1. Octoparse
Octoparse is a robust web scraping tool that also provides web scraping services for business owners and enterprises.
Device: As it can be installed on both Windows and Mac OS, users can scrape data with apple devices.
Data: Web data extraction for social media, e-commerce, marketing, real-estate listing, etc.
Function:
– handle both static and dynamic websites with AJAX, JavaScript, cookies, etc.
– extract data from a complex website that requires login and pagination.
– deal with information that is not showing on the websites by parsing the source code.
Use cases: As a result, you can achieve automatic inventories tracking, price monitoring, and leads generation within your fingertips.
Octoparse offers different options for users with different levels of coding skills.
The Task Template Mode enables non-coding users to turn web pages into some structured data instantly. On average, it only takes about 6. 5 seconds to pull down the data behind one page and allows you to download the data to Excel. Check out what templates are most popular.
The Advanced mode has more flexibility. This allows users to configure and edit the workflow with more options. Advance mode is used for scraping more complex websites with a massive amount of data.
The brand new Auto-detection feature allows you to build a crawler with one click. If you are not satisfied with the auto-generated data fields, you can always customize the scraping task to let it scrape the data for you.
The cloud services enable large data extraction within a short time frame as multiple cloud servers concurrently are running for one task. Besides that, the cloud service will allow you to store and retrieve the data at any time.
2. ParseHub
Parsehub is a web scraper that collects data from websites using AJAX technologies, JavaScript, cookies and etc. Parsehub leverages machine learning technology which is able to read, analyze and transform web documents into relevant data.
Device: The desktop application of Parsehub supports systems such as Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, or you can use the browser extension to achieve instant scraping.
Pricing: It is not fully free, but you still can set up to five scraping tasks for free. The paid subscription plan allows you to set up at least 20 private projects.
Tutorial: There are plenty of tutorials at Parsehub and you can get more information from the homepage.
3.
is a SaaS web data integration software. It provides a visual environment for end-users to design and customize the workflows for harvesting data. It covers the entire web extraction lifecycle from data extraction to analysis within one platform. And you can easily integrate into other systems as well.
Function: large-scale data scraping, capture photos and PDFs in a feasible format
Integration: integration with data analysis tools
Pricing: the price of the service is only presented through consultation case by case
1. Data Scraper (Chrome)
Data Scraper can scrape data from tables and listing type data from a single web page. Its free plan should satisfy most simple scraping with a light amount of data. The paid plan has more features such as API and many anonymous IP proxies. You can fetch a large volume of data in real-time faster. You can scrape up to 500 pages per month, you need to upgrade to a paid plan.
2. Web scraper
Web scraper has a chrome extension and cloud extension.
For the chrome extension version, you can create a sitemap (plan) on how a website should be navigated and what data should be scrapped.
The cloud extension is can scrape a large volume of data and run multiple scraping tasks concurrently. You can export the data in CSV, or store the data into Couch DB.
3. Scraper (Chrome)
The scraper is another easy-to-use screen web scraper that can easily extract data from an online table, and upload the result to Google Docs.
Just select some text in a table or a list, right-click on the selected text, and choose “Scrape Similar” from the browser menu. Then you will get the data and extract other content by adding new columns using XPath or JQuery. This tool is intended for intermediate to advanced users who know how to write XPath.
4. Outwit hub(Firefox)
Outwit hub is a Firefox extension, and it can be easily downloaded from the Firefox add-ons store. Once installed and activated, you can scrape the content from websites instantly.
Function: It has outstanding “Fast Scrape” features, which quickly scrapes data from a list of URLs that you feed in. Extracting data from sites using Outwit hub doesn’t demand programming skills.
Training: The scraping process is fairly easy to pick up. Users can refer to their guides to get started with web scraping using the tool.
Outwit Hub also offers services of tailor-making scrapers.
1. (formerly known as Cloud scrape)
is intended for advanced users who have proficient programming skills. It has three types of robots for you to create a scraping task – Extractor, Crawler, and Pipes. It provides various tools that allow you to extract the data more precisely. With its modern feature, you will be able to address the details on any website. With no programming skills, you may need to take a while to get used to it before creating a web scraping robot. Check out their homepage to learn more about the knowledge base.
The freeware provides anonymous web proxy servers for web scraping. Extracted data will be hosted on ’s servers for two weeks before being 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.
2.
enables you to get real-time data from scraping online sources from all over the world into various, clean formats. You even can scrape information on the dark web. This web scraper allows you to scrape data in many different languages using multiple filters and export scraped data in XML, JSON, and RSS formats.
The freeware offers a free subscription plan for you to make 1000 HTTP requests per month and paid subscription plans to make more HTTP requests per month to suit your web scraping needs.
9 Web Scraping Challenges You Should Know
How to Scrape Websites at Large Scale
25 Ways to Grow Your Business with Web Scraping
Web Scraping 101: 10 Myths that Everyone Should Know
Top 20 Web Crawling Tools to Scrape Websites Quickly
10 FREE Web Scrapers That You Cannot Miss in 2021
How much do you know about web scraping? No worries, this article will brief you on the basics of web scraping, how to access a web scraping tool to get a tool that perfectly matches your needs, and last but not least, present you with a list of web scraping tools for your reference.
Table of Content
Web scraping and how it is used
How to choose a web scraping tool
Three types of web scraping tools
Web Scraping And How It Is Used
Web scraping is a way of gathering data from web pages with a scraping bot, hence the whole process is done in an automated way. The technique allows people to obtain web data at a large scale fast. In the meantime, instruments like Regex (Regular Expression) enable data cleaning during the scraping process, which means people can get well-structured clean data one-stop.
How does web scraping work?
Firstly, a web scraping bot simulates the act of human browsing the website. With the target URL entered, it sends a request to the server and gets information back in the HTML file.
Next, with the HTML source code at hand, the bot is able to reach the node where target data lies and parse the data as it is commanded in the scraping code.
Lastly, (based on how the scraping bot is configured) the cluster of scraped data will be cleaned, put into a structure, and ready for download or transference to your database.
How To Choose A Web Scraping Tool
There are ways to get access to web data. Even though you have narrowed it down to a web scraping tool, tools popped up in the search results with all confusing features still can make a decision hard to reach.
There are a few dimensions you may take into consideration before choosing a web scraping tool:
Device: if you are a Mac or Linux user, you should make sure the tool support your system.
Cloud service: cloud service is important if you want to access your data across devices anytime.
Integration: how you would use the data later on? Integration options enable better automation of the whole process of dealing with data.
Training: if you do not excel at programming, better make sure there are guides and support to help you throughout the data scraping journey.
Pricing: yep, the cost of a tool shall always be taken into consideration and it varies a lot among different venders.
Now you may want to know what web scraping tools to choose from:
Three Types of Scraping Tool
Web Scraper Client
Web Scraping Plugins/Extension
Web-based Scraping Application
There are many free web scraping tools. However, not all web scraping software is for non-programmers. The lists below are the best web scraping tools without coding skills at a low cost. The freeware listed below is easy to pick up and would satisfy most scraping needs with a reasonable amount of data requirement.
Web Scraping Tools Client-based
1. Octoparse
Octoparse is a robust web scraping tool that also provides web scraping services for business owners and enterprises.
Device: As it can be installed on both Windows and Mac OS, users can scrape data with apple devices.
Data: Web data extraction for social media, e-commerce, marketing, real-estate listing, etc.
Function:
– handle both static and dynamic websites with AJAX, JavaScript, cookies, etc.
– extract data from a complex website that requires login and pagination.
– deal with information that is not showing on the websites by parsing the source code.
Use cases: As a result, you can achieve automatic inventories tracking, price monitoring, and leads generation within your fingertips.
Octoparse offers different options for users with different levels of coding skills.
The Task Template Mode enables non-coding users to turn web pages into some structured data instantly. On average, it only takes about 6. 5 seconds to pull down the data behind one page and allows you to download the data to Excel. Check out what templates are most popular.
The Advanced mode has more flexibility. This allows users to configure and edit the workflow with more options. Advance mode is used for scraping more complex websites with a massive amount of data.
The brand new Auto-detection feature allows you to build a crawler with one click. If you are not satisfied with the auto-generated data fields, you can always customize the scraping task to let it scrape the data for you.
The cloud services enable large data extraction within a short time frame as multiple cloud servers concurrently are running for one task. Besides that, the cloud service will allow you to store and retrieve the data at any time.
2. ParseHub
Parsehub is a web scraper that collects data from websites using AJAX technologies, JavaScript, cookies and etc. Parsehub leverages machine learning technology which is able to read, analyze and transform web documents into relevant data.
Device: The desktop application of Parsehub supports systems such as Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, or you can use the browser extension to achieve instant scraping.
Pricing: It is not fully free, but you still can set up to five scraping tasks for free. The paid subscription plan allows you to set up at least 20 private projects.
Tutorial: There are plenty of tutorials at Parsehub and you can get more information from the homepage.
3.
is a SaaS web data integration software. It provides a visual environment for end-users to design and customize the workflows for harvesting data. It covers the entire web extraction lifecycle from data extraction to analysis within one platform. And you can easily integrate into other systems as well.
Function: large-scale data scraping, capture photos and PDFs in a feasible format
Integration: integration with data analysis tools
Pricing: the price of the service is only presented through consultation case by case
1. Data Scraper (Chrome)
Data Scraper can scrape data from tables and listing type data from a single web page. Its free plan should satisfy most simple scraping with a light amount of data. The paid plan has more features such as API and many anonymous IP proxies. You can fetch a large volume of data in real-time faster. You can scrape up to 500 pages per month, you need to upgrade to a paid plan.
2. Web scraper
Web scraper has a chrome extension and cloud extension.
For the chrome extension version, you can create a sitemap (plan) on how a website should be navigated and what data should be scrapped.
The cloud extension is can scrape a large volume of data and run multiple scraping tasks concurrently. You can export the data in CSV, or store the data into Couch DB.
3. Scraper (Chrome)
The scraper is another easy-to-use screen web scraper that can easily extract data from an online table, and upload the result to Google Docs.
Just select some text in a table or a list, right-click on the selected text, and choose “Scrape Similar” from the browser menu. Then you will get the data and extract other content by adding new columns using XPath or JQuery. This tool is intended for intermediate to advanced users who know how to write XPath.
4. Outwit hub(Firefox)
Outwit hub is a Firefox extension, and it can be easily downloaded from the Firefox add-ons store. Once installed and activated, you can scrape the content from websites instantly.
Function: It has outstanding “Fast Scrape” features, which quickly scrapes data from a list of URLs that you feed in. Extracting data from sites using Outwit hub doesn’t demand programming skills.
Training: The scraping process is fairly easy to pick up. Users can refer to their guides to get started with web scraping using the tool.
Outwit Hub also offers services of tailor-making scrapers.
1. (formerly known as Cloud scrape)
is intended for advanced users who have proficient programming skills. It has three types of robots for you to create a scraping task – Extractor, Crawler, and Pipes. It provides various tools that allow you to extract the data more precisely. With its modern feature, you will be able to address the details on any website. With no programming skills, you may need to take a while to get used to it before creating a web scraping robot. Check out their homepage to learn more about the knowledge base.
The freeware provides anonymous web proxy servers for web scraping. Extracted data will be hosted on ’s servers for two weeks before being 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.
2.
enables you to get real-time data from scraping online sources from all over the world into various, clean formats. You even can scrape information on the dark web. This web scraper allows you to scrape data in many different languages using multiple filters and export scraped data in XML, JSON, and RSS formats.
The freeware offers a free subscription plan for you to make 1000 HTTP requests per month and paid subscription plans to make more HTTP requests per month to suit your web scraping needs.
9 Web Scraping Challenges You Should Know
How to Scrape Websites at Large Scale
25 Ways to Grow Your Business with Web Scraping
Web Scraping 101: 10 Myths that Everyone Should Know
Top 20 Web Crawling Tools to Scrape Websites Quickly
Pulling Data from the Web: How to Get Data from a Website | Import.io
The value of web data is increasing in every industry from retail competitive price monitoring to alternative data for investment research. Getting that data from a website is vital to the success of your business. As the trusted research firm, Gartner, stated in their blog:
“Your company’s biggest database isn’t your transaction, CRM, ERP or other internal database. Rather it’s the Web itself…Treat the Internet itself as your organization’s largest data source. ”
In fact, the internet is the largest source of business data on earth and it’s growing by the minute. The infograph below from Domo shows how much web data is created every minute from just a few websites out of a billion.
Source Domo
It’s clear the need for web data integration is greater than ever. This article will walk you through a simple process of pulling data from a webpage using data extraction software. First, let’s look at other uses of web data in business.
How do businesses use data from a website?
Competitive price comparison and alternative data for equity research are two popular uses of website data, but there are others less obvious.
Here are a few examples:
Teaching Movie Studios how to spot a hit manuscript
For StoryFit, data is the fuel that powers its predictive analytic engines. StoryFit’s artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms are trained using vast amounts of data culled from a variety of sources, including extractors. This data contributes to StoryFit’s core NLP-focused AI to train machine learning models to determine what makes a hit movie.
Predicative Shipping Logistics
ClearMetal is a Predictive Logistics company using data science to unlock unprecedented efficiencies for global trade. They are using web data to mine all container and shipping information in the world then feed predictions back to companies that run terminals.
Market Intelligence
XiKO provides market intelligence around what consumers say online about brands and products. This information allows marketers to increase the efficacy of their programs and advertising. The key to XiKO’s success lies in its ability to apply linguistic modeling to vast amounts of data collected from websites.
Data-driven Marketing
Virtuance uses web data to review listing information from real estate sites to determine which listings need professional marketing and photography. From this data, Virtuance determines who needs their marketing services and develops success metrics based on the aggregated data.
Now that you have some examples of what companies are doing with web data, below are the steps that will show you how to pull data from a website.
Steps to get data from a website
Websites are built for human consumption, not machine. So it’s not always easy to get web data into a spreadsheet for analysis or machine learning. Copying and pasting information from websites is time-consuming, error-prone and not feasible.
Web scraping is a way to get data from a website by sending a query to the requested page, then combing through the HTML for specific items and organizing the data. If you don’t have an engineer on hand, provides a no-coding, point and click web data extraction platform that makes it easy to get web data.
Here’s a quick tutorial on how it works:
Step 1. First, find the page where your data is located. For instance, a product page on
Step 1. First, find the page where your data is located.
Step 2. Copy and paste the URL from that page into, to create an extractor that will attempt to get the right data.
Step 2. Copy and paste the URL from that page into
Step 3. Click Go and will query the page and use machine learning to try to determine what data you want.
Step 4. Once it’s done, you can decide if the extracted data is what you need. In this case, we want to extract the images as well as the product names and prices into columns. We trained the extractor by clicking on the top three items in each column, which then outlines all items belonging to that column in green.
Step 4. Once it’s done, you can decide if the extracted data is what you need.
Step 5. then populates the rest of the column for the product names and prices.
Step 6. Next, click on Extract data from website.
Step 7. has detected that the product listing data spans more than one page, so you can add as many pages as needed to ensure that you get every product in this category into your spreadsheet.
Step 8. Now, you can download the images, product names, and prices.
Step 9. First, download the product name and price into an Excel spreadsheet.
Step 10. Next, download the images as files to use to populate your own website or marketplace.
What else can you do with web scraping?
This is a very simple look at getting a basic list page of data into a spreadsheet and the images into a Zip folder of image files.
There’s much more you can do, such as:
Link this listing page to data contained on the detail pages for each product.
Schedule a change report to run daily to track when prices change or items are removed or added to the category.
Compare product prices on Amazon to other online retailers, such as Walmart, Target, etc.
Visualize the data in charts and graphs using Insights.
Feed this data into your internal processes or analysis tools via the APIs.
Web scraping is a powerful, automated way to get data from a website. If your data needs are massive or your websites trickier, offers data as a service and we will get your web data for you.
No matter what or how much web data you need, can help. We offer the world’s only web data integration platform which not only extracts data from a website, it identifies, prepares, integrates, and consumes it. This platform can meet an organization’s consumption needs for business applications, analytics, and other processes. You can start by talking to a data expert to determine the best solution for your data needs, or you can give the platform a try yourself. Sign up for a free seven day trial, or we’ll handle all the work for you.
Frequently Asked Questions about website data extraction free
How can I extract data from a website for free?
Besides that, the cloud service will allow you to store and retrieve the data at any time.ScrapingBot.Data Scraper (Chrome)Web scraper.Scraper (Chrome)Outwit hub(Firefox)Dexi.io (formerly known as Cloud scrape)Webhose.io.Aug 3, 2021
How can I extract data from a website online?
Steps to get data from a websiteFirst, find the page where your data is located. … Copy and paste the URL from that page into Import.io, to create an extractor that will attempt to get the right data. … Click Go and Import.io will query the page and use machine learning to try to determine what data you want.More items…•Aug 9, 2018
Is it legal to extract data from websites?
It is perfectly legal if you scrape data from websites for public consumption and use it for analysis. However, it is not legal if you scrape confidential information for profit. For example, scraping private contact information without permission, and sell them to a 3rd party for profit is illegal.Aug 16, 2021
