Web Scraping Tools
8 Best Web Scraping Tools – Learn – Hevo Data
Web Scraping simply is the process of gathering information from the Internet. Through Web Scraping Tools one can download structured data from the web to be used for analysis in an automated fashion.
This article aims at providing you with in-depth knowledge about what Web Scraping is and why it’s essential, along with a comprehensive list of the 8 Best Web Scraping Tools out there in the market, keeping in mind the features offered by each of these, pricing, target audience, and shortcomings. It will help you make an informed decision regarding the Best Web Scraping Tool catering to your business.
Table of Contents
Understanding Web ScrapingUses of Web Scraping ToolsFactors to Consider when Choosing Web Scraping ToolsTop 8 Web Scraping ToolsParseHubScrapyOctoParseScraper Content GrabberCommon CrawlConclusion
Understanding Web Scraping
Web Scraping refers to the extraction of content and data from a website. This information is then extracted in a format that is more useful to the user.
Web Scraping can be done manually, but this is extremely tedious work. To speed up the process you can use Web Scraping Tools that would be automated, cost less, and work more swiftly.
How does a Web Scraper work exactly?
First, the Web Scraper is given the URLs to load up before the scraping process. The scraper then loads the complete HTML code for the desired page. The Web Scraper will then extract either all the data on the page or the specific data selected by the user before running the nally, the Web Scraper outputs all the data that has been collected into a usable format.
Uses of Web Scraping Tools
Web Scraping Tools are used for a large number of purposes like:
Data Collection for Market ntact Information Tracking from Multiple Monitoring.
Factors to Consider when Choosing Web Scraping Tools
Most of the data present on the Internet is unstructured. Therefore we need to have systems in place to extract meaningful insights from it. As someone looking to play around with data and extract some meaningful insights from it, one of the most fundamental tasks that you are required to carry out is Web Scraping. But Web Scraping can be a resource-intensive endeavor that requires you to begin with all the necessary Web Scraping Tools at your disposal. There are a couple of factors that you need to keep in mind before you decide on the right Web Scraping Tools.
Scalability: The tool you use should be scalable because your data scraping needs will only increase with time. So you need to pick a Web Scraping Tool that doesn’t slow down with the increase in data demand. Transparent Pricing Structure: The pricing structure for the opted tool should be fairly transparent. This means that hidden costs shouldn’t crop up at a later stage; instead, every explicit detail must be made clear in the pricing structure. Choose a provider that has a clear model and doesn’t beat around the bush when talking about the features being Delivery: The choice of a desirable Web Scraping Tool will also depend on the data format in which the data must be delivered. For instance, if your data needs to be delivered in JSON format, then your search should be narrowed down to the crawlers that deliver in JSON format. To be on the safe side, you must pick a provider that provides a crawler that can deliver data in a wide array of formats. Since there are occasions where you may have to deliver data in formats that you aren’t used to. Versatility ensures that you don’t fall short when it comes to data delivery. Ideally, data delivery formats should be XML, JSON, CSV, or have it delivered to FTP, Google Cloud Storage, DropBox, etc. Handling Anti-Scraping Mechanisms: There are websites on the Internet that have anti-scraping measures in place. If you are afraid you’ve hit a wall with this, these measures can be bypassed through simple modifications to the crawler. Pick a web crawler that comes in handy in overcoming these roadblocks with a robust mechanism of its stomer Support: You might run into an issue while running your Web Scraping Tool and might need assistance to solve that issue. Customer support, therefore, becomes an important factor while deciding on a good tool. This must be the priority for the Web Scraping provider. With great customer support, you don’t need to worry about if anything goes wrong. You can bid farewell to the frustration that comes from having to wait for satisfactory answers with good customer support. Test the customer support by reaching out to them before making a purchase and note the time it takes them to respond before making an informed decision. Quality Of Data: As we discussed before, most of the data present on the Internet is unstructured and needs to be cleaned and organized before it can be put to actual use. Try looking for a Web Scraping provider that provides you the required tools to help with the cleaning and organizing of data that is scraped. Since the quality of data will impact analysis further, it is imperative to keep this factor in mind.
Hevo offers a faster way to move data from databases, SaaS applications and 100+ other data sources into your data warehouse to be visualized in a BI tool. Hevo is fully automated and hence does not require you to code.
Get Started with Hevo for FreeCheck out some of the cool features of Hevo:
Completely Automated: The Hevo platform can be set up in just a few minutes and requires minimal Data Transfer: Hevo provides real-time data migration, so you can have analysis-ready data always. 100% Complete & Accurate Data Transfer: Hevo’s robust infrastructure ensures reliable data transfer with zero data alable Infrastructure: Hevo has in-built integrations for 100+ sources that can help you scale your data infrastructure as required. 24/7 Live Support: The Hevo team is available round the clock to extend exceptional support to you through chat, email, and support Management: Hevo takes away the tedious task of schema management & automatically detects the schema of incoming data and maps it to the destination Monitoring: Hevo allows you to monitor the data flow so you can check where your data is at a particular point in time.
Sign up here for a 14-Day Free Trial!
Top 8 Web Scraping Tools
Choosing the ideal Web Scraping Tool that perfectly meets your business requirements can be a challenging task, especially when there’s a large variety of Web Scraping Tools available in the market. To simplify your search, here is a comprehensive list of 8 Best Web Scraping Tools that you can choose from:
ParseHubScrapyOctoParseScraper Content GrabberCommon Crawl
1. ParseHub
Image Source
Target Audience
ParseHub is an incredibly powerful and elegant tool that allows you to build web scrapers without having to write a single line of code. It is therefore as simple as simply selecting the data you need. ParseHub is targeted at pretty much anyone that wishes to play around with data. This could be anyone from analysts and data scientists to journalists.
Key Features of ParseHub
Clean Text and HTML before downloading to use graphical rseHub allows you to collect and store data on servers tomatic IP raping behind logic walls ovides Desktop Clients for Windows, Mac OS, is exported in JSON or Excel extract data from tables and maps.
ParseHub Pricing
ParseHub’s pricing structure looks like this:
Everyone: It is made available to the users free of cost. Allows 200 pages per run in 40 minutes. It supports up to 5 public projects with very limited support and data retention for 14 andard($149/month): You can get 200 pages in about 10 minutes with this plan, allowing you to scrap 10, 00 pages per run. With the Standard Plan, you can support 20 private projects backed by standard support with data retention of 14 days. Along with these features you also get IP rotation, scheduling, and the ability to store images and files in DropBox or Amazon ofessional($499/month): Scraping speed is faster than the Standard Plan(scrape up to 200 pages in 2 minutes) allowing you unlimited pages per run. You can run 120 private projects with priority support and data retention for 30 days plus the features offered in the Standard Plan. Enterprise(Open To Discussion): You can get in touch with the ParseHub team to lay down a customized plan for you based on your business needs, offering unlimited pages per run and dedicated scraping speeds across all the projects you choose to undertake on top of the features offered in the Professional Plan.
Shortcomings
Troubleshooting is not easy for larger output can be very limiting at times(not being able to publish complete scraped output).
2. Scrapy
Scrapy is a Web Scraping library used by python developers to build scalable web crawlers. It is a complete web crawling framework that handles all the functionalities that make building web crawlers difficult such as proxy middleware, querying requests among many others.
Key Features of Scrapy
Open Source Tool. Extremely well Extensible. Portable ployment is simple and reliable. Middleware modules are available for the integration of useful tools.
Scrapy Pricing
It is an open-source tool that is free of cost and managed by Scrapinghub and other contributors.
In terms of JavaScript support it is time consuming to inspect and develop the crawler to simulate AJAX/PJAX requests.
3. OctoParse
OctoParse has a target audience similar to ParseHub, catering to people who want to scrape data without having to write a single line of code, while still having control over the full process with their highly intuitive user interface.
Key Features of OctoParse
Site Parser and hosted solution for users who want to run scrapers in the and click screen scraper allowing you to scrape behind login forms, fill in forms, render javascript, scroll through the infinite scroll, and many more. Anonymous Web Data Scraping to avoid being banned.
OctoParse Pricing
Free: This plan offers unlimited pages per crawl, unlimited computers, 10, 00 records per export, and 2 concurrent local runs allowing you to build up to 10 crawlers for free with community support. Standard($75/month): This plan offers unlimited data export, 100 crawlers, scheduled extractions, Average speed extraction, auto IP rotation, task Templates, API access, and email support. This plan is mainly designed for small ofessional($209/month): This plan offers 250 crawlers, Scheduled extractions, 20 concurrent cloud extractions, High-speed extraction, Auto IP rotation, Task Templates, and Advanced API. Enterprise(Open to Discussion): All the pro features with scalable concurrent processors, multi-role access, and tailored onboarding are among the few features offered in the Enterprise Plan which is completely customized for your business needs.
OctoParse also offers Crawler Service and Data Service starting at $189 and $399 respectively.
If you run the crawler with local extraction instead of running it from the cloud, it halts automatically after 4 hours, which makes the process of recovering, saving and starting over with the next set of data very cumbersome.
4. Scraper API
Scraper API is designed for designers building web scrapers. It handles browsers, proxies, and CAPTCHAs which means that raw HTML from any website can be obtained through a simple API call.
Key Features of Scraper API
Helps you render to integrate. Geolocated Rotating Speed and reliability to build scalable web scrapers. Special pools of proxies for E-commerce price scraping, search engine scraping, social media scraping, etc.
Scraper API Pricing
Scraper API offers 1000 free API calls to start. Scraper API thereafter offers several lucrative price plans to pick from.
Hobby($29/month): This plan offers 10 Concurrent requests, 250, 000 API Calls, no Geotargeting, no JS Rendering, Standard Proxies, and reliable Email artup($99/month): The Startup Plan offers 25 Concurrent Requests, 1, 000, 000 API Calls, US Geotargeting, No JS Rendering, Standard Proxies, and Email ($249/month): The Business Plan of Scraper API offers 50 Concurrent Requests, 3, 000, 000 API Calls, All Geotargeting, JS Rendering, Residential Proxies, and Priority Email Support. Enterprise Custom(Open to Discussion): The Enterprise Custom Plan offers you an assortment of features tailored to your business needs with all the features offered in the other plans.
Scraper API as a Web Scraping Tool is not deemed suitable for browsing.
5. Mozenda
Mozenda caters to enterprises looking for a cloud-based self serve Web Scraping platform. Having scraped over 7 billion pages, Mozenda boasts enterprise customers all over the world.
Key Features of Mozenda
Offers point and click interface to create Web Scraping events in no quest blocking features and job sequencer to harvest web data in customer support and in-class account llection and publishing of data to preferred BI tools or databases ovide both phone and email support to all the scalable On-premise Hosting.
Mozenda Pricing
Mozenda’s pricing plan uses something called Processing Credits that distinguishes itself from other Web Scraping Tools. Processing Credits measures how much of Mozenda’s computing resources are used in various customer activities like page navigation, premium harvesting, image or file downloads.
Project: This is aimed at small projects with pretty low capacity requirements. It is designed for 1 user and it can build 10 web crawlers and accumulate up to 20k processing credits/month. Professional: This is offered as an entry-level business package that includes faster execution, professional support, and access to pipes and Mozenda’s apps. (35k processing credits/month)Corporate: This plan is tailored for medium to large-scale data intelligence projects handling large datasets and higher capacity requirements. ( 1 million processing credits/ month)Managed Services: This plan provides enterprise-level data extraction, monitoring, and processing. It stands out from the crowd with its dedicated capacity, prioritized robot support, and This is a secure self-hosted solution and is considered ideal for hedge funds, banks, or government and healthcare organizations who need to set up high privacy measures, comply with government and HIPAA regulations and protect their intranets containing private information.
Mozenda is a little pricey compared to the other Web Scraping Tools talked about so far with their lowest plan starting from $250/month.
6.
is best recommended for platforms or services that are on the lookout for a completely developed web scraper and data supplier for content marketing, sharing, etc. The cost offered by the platform happens to be quite affordable for growing companies.
Key Features of
Content Indexing is fairly fast. A dedicated support team that is highly Integration with different to use APIs providing full control for language and source and intuitive interface design allowing you to perform all tasks in a much simpler and practical structured, machine-readable data sets in JSON and XML access to historical feeds dating as far back as 10 ovides access to a massive repository of data feeds without having to bother about paying extra advanced feature allows you to conduct granular analysis on datasets you want to feed.
Pricing
The free version provides 1000 HTTP requests per month. Paid plans offer more features like more calls, power over the extracted data, and more benefits like image analytics, Geo-location, dark web monitoring, and up to 10 years of archived historical data.
The different plans are:-
Open Web Data Feeds: This plan incorporates Enterprise-level coverage, Real-Time Monitoring, Engagement Metrics like Social Signals and Virality Score along with clean JSON/XML Data Feed: The Cyber Data Feed plan provides the user with Real-Time Monitoring, Entity and Threat Recognition, Image Analytics and Geo-location along with access to TOR, ZeroNet, I2P, Telegram, etcArchived Web Data: This plan provides you with an archive of data dating back to 10 years, Sentiment and Entity Recognition, Engagement Metrics. This is a prepaid credit account pricing model.
The option for data retention of historical data was not available for a few were unable to change the plan within the web interface on their own, which required intervention from the sales team. Setup isn’t that simplified for non-developers.
7. Content Grabber
Content Grabber is a cloud-based Web Scraping Tool that helps businesses of all sizes with data extraction.
Key Features of Content Grabber
Web data extraction is faster compared to a lot of its you to build web apps with the dedicated API allowing you to execute web data directly from your can schedule it to scrape information from the web a wide variety of formats for the extracted data like CSV, JSON, etc.
Content Grabber Pricing
Two pricing models available for users of Content Grabber:-
Buying a licenseMonthly Subscription
For each you have three subcategories:-
Server($69/month, $449/year): This model comes equipped with a Limited Content Grabber Agent Editor allowing you to edit, run and debug agents. It also provides Scripting Support, Command-Line, and an API. Professional($149/month, $995/year): This model comes equipped with a Full-Featured Content Grabber Agent Editor allowing you to edit, run and debug agents. It also provides Scripting Support, Command-Line along with self-contained agents. However, this model does not provide an emium($299/month, $2495/year): This model comes equipped with a Full-Featured Content Grabber Agent Editor allowing you to edit, run and debug agents. It also provides Scripting Support, Command-Line along with self-contained agents and provides an API as well.
Prior knowledge of HTML and HTTP crawlers for previously scraped websites not available.
8. Common Crawl
Common Crawl was developed for anyone wishing to explore and analyze data and uncover meaningful insights from it.
Key Features of Common Crawl
Open Datasets of raw web page data and text pport for non-code based usage cases. Provides resources for educators teaching data analysis.
Common Crawl Pricing
Common Crawl allows any interested person to use this tool without having to worry about fees or any other complications. It is a registered non-profit platform that relies on donations to keep its operations smoothly running.
Support for live data isn’t pport for AJAX based sites isn’t data available in Common Crawl isn’t structured and can’t be filtered.
Conclusion
This blog first gave an idea about Web Scraping in general. It then listed the essential factors to keep in mind when making an informed decision about making a Web Scraping Tool purchase followed by a sneak peek at 8 of the best Web Scraping Tools in the market considering a string of factors. The main takeaway from this blog, therefore, is that in the end, a user should pick the Web Scraping Tools that suit their needs. Extracting complex data from a diverse set of data sources can be a challenging task and this is where Hevo saves the day!
Visit our Website to Explore HevoHevo, a No-code Data Pipeline helps you transfer data from a source of your choice in a fully automated and secure manner without having to write the code repeatedly. Hevo, with its secure integrations with 100+ sources & BI tools, allows you to export, load, transform, & enrich your data & make it analysis-ready in a jiffy.
Want to take Hevo for a spin? Sign Up for a 14-day free trial and experience the feature-rich Hevo suite first hand. You can also have a look at the unbeatable pricing that will help you choose the right plan for your business needs.
No-code Data Pipeline For Your Data Warehouse
12 Best Web Scraping Tools in 2021 to Extract Online Data
Web scraping tools are software developed specifically to simplify the process of data extraction from websites. Data extraction is quite a useful and commonly used process however, it also can easily turn into a complicated, messy business and require a heavy amount of time and effort.
So, what does a web scraper do?
A web scraper uses bots to extract structured data and content from a website by extracting the underlying HTML code and data stored in a database.
In data extraction, from preventing your IP from getting banned to parsing the source website correctly, generating data in a compatible format, and to data cleaning, there is a lot of sub-process that goes in. Luckily, web scrapers and data scraping tools make this process easy, fast, and reliable.
Often, the information online to be extracted is too large to be manually extracted. That is why companies who use web scraping tools may collect more data in a shorter amount of time at a lower cost.
Besides, companies benefitting from data scraping get a step ahead in the competition between the rivals in the long run.
In this post, you will find a list of the top 12 best web scraping tools compared based on their features, pricing, and ease-of-use.
12 Best Web Scraping Tools
Here’s a list of the best web scraping tools:
Luminati (BrightData)
Scrapingdog
AvesAPI
ParseHub
Diffbot
Octoparse
ScrapingBee
Grepsr
Scraper API
Scrapy
Web Scraping Tools
Pricing for 1, 000, 000 API Calls
IP Rotation
JS Rendering
Geolocating
$99/m
✔
$90/m
$800/m
✘
$499/m
$899/m
$75/m
Luminati
Pay-As-You-Go
$999/m
Free
On application
Web scraper tools search for new data manually or automatically. They fetch the updated or new data, and then, store them for you to easily access. These tools are useful for anyone trying to collect data from the internet.
For example, web scraping tools can be used to collect real estate data, hotel data from top travel portals, product, pricing, and review data for e-commerce websites, and more. So, basically, if you are asking yourself ‘where can I scrape data, ’ it is data scraping tools.
Now, let’s take a look at the list of the best web scraper tools in comparison to answer the question; what is the best web scraping tool?
is an easy-to-use web scraper tool, providing a scalable, fast, proxy web scraper API in an endpoint. Based on cost-effectiveness and features, is on top of the list. As you will see in the continuation of this post, is one of the lowest cost web scraping tools out there.
-Unlike its competitors, does not charge extra for Google and other hard-to-scrape websites.
-It offers the best price/performance ratio in the market for Google scraping (SERP). (5, 000, 000 SERP for $249)
-Additionally, has 2-3 seconds average speed in collecting anonymous data from Instagram and a 99% success rate.
-Its gateway speed is also 4 times faster than its competitors.
-Moreover, this tool is providing residential and mobile proxy access twice as cheaper.
Here are some of its other features.
Features
Rotating proxies; allow you to scrape any website. rotates every request made to the API using its proxy pool.
Unlimited bandwidth in all plans
Fully customizable
Only charges for successful requests
Geotargeting option for over 10 countries
JavaScript render which allows scraping web pages that require to render JavaScript
Super proxy parameter: allows you to scrape data from websites with protections against data center IPs.
Pricing: Price plans start at $29/m. Pro plan is $99/m for 1, 300, 000 API calls.
Scrapingdog is a web scraping tool that makes it easier to handle proxies, browsers, as well as CAPTCHAs. This tool provides HTML data of any webpage in a single API call. One of the best features of Scraping dog is that it also has a LinkedIn API available. Here are other prominent features of Scrapingdog:
Rotates IP address with each request and bypasses every CAPTCHA for scraping without getting blocked.
Rendering JavaScript
Webhooks
Headless Chrome
Who is it for? Scrapingdog is for anyone who needs web scraping, from developers to non-developers.
Pricing: Price plans start at $20/m. JS rendering feature is available for at least the standard plan which is $90/m. LinkedIn API available only for the pro plan ($200/m. )
AvesAPI is a SERP (search engine results page) API tool that allows developers and agencies to scrape structured data from Google Search.
Unlike other services in our list, AvesAPI has a sharp focus on the data you’ll be extracting, rather than a broader web scraping. Therefore, it’s best for SEO tools and agencies, as well as marketing professionals.
This web scraper offers a smart distributed system that is capable of extracting millions of keywords with ease. That means leaving behind the time-consuming workload of checking SERP results manually and avoiding CAPTCHA.
Features:
Get structured data in JSON or HTML in real-time
Acquire top-100 results from any location and language
Geo-specific search for local results
Parse product data on shopping
Downside: Since this tool was founded quite recently, it’s hard to tell how real users feel about the product. However, what the product is promising is still excellent to give it a free try and see for yourself.
Pricing: AvesAPI’s prices are quite affordable compared to other web scraping tools. Plus, you can try the service for free.
Paid plans start at $50 per month for 25K searches.
ParseHub is a free web scraper tool developed for extracting online data. This tool comes as a downloadable desktop app. It provides more features than most of the other scrapers, for example, you can scrape and download images/files, download CSV and JSON files. Here’s a list of more of its features.
IP rotation
Cloud-based for automatically storing data
Scheduled collection (to collect data monthly, weekly, etc. )
Regular expressions to clean text and HTML before downloading data
API & webhooks for integrations
REST API
JSON and Excel format for downloads
Get data from tables and maps
Infinitely scrolling pages
Get data behind a log-in
Pricing: Yes, ParseHub offers a variety of features, but most of them are not included in its free plan. The free plan covers 200 pages of data in 40 minutes and 5 public projects.
Priced plans start at $149/m. So, I can suggest that more features come at a higher cost. If your business is small, it may be best to use the free version or one of the cheaper web scrapers on our list.
Diffbot is another web scraping tool that provides extracted data from web pages. This data scraper is one of the top content extractors out there. It allows you to identify pages automatically with the Analyze API feature and extract products, articles, discussions, videos, or images.
Product API
Clean text and HTML
Structured search to see only the matching results
Visual processing that enables scraping most non-English web pages
JSON or CSV format
The article, product, discussion, video, image extraction APIs
Custom crawling controls
Fully-hosted SaaS
Pricing: 14-day free trial. Price plans start at $299/m, which is quite expensive and a drawback for the tool. However, it’s up to you to decide whether you need the extra features this tool provides and to evaluate its cost-effectiveness for your business.
Octoparse stands out as an easy-to-use, no-code web scraping tool. It provides cloud services to store extracted data and IP rotation to prevent IPs from getting blocked. You can schedule scraping at any specific time. Besides, it offers an infinite scrolling feature. Download results can be in CSV, Excel, or API formats.
Who is it for? Octoparse is best for non-developers who are looking for a friendly interface to manage data extraction processes.
Capterra Rating: 4. 6/5
Pricing: Free plan available with limited features. Price plans start at $75/m.
ScrapingBee is another popular data extraction tool. It renders your web page as if it was a real browser, enabling the management of thousands of headless instances using the latest Chrome version.
So, they claim dealing with headless browsers as other web scrapers do is time-wasting and eating up your RAM & CPU. What else does ScrapingBee offer?
JavaScript rendering
Rotating proxies
General web scraping tasks like real estate scraping, price-monitoring, extracting reviews without getting blocked.
Scraping search engine results pages
Growth hacking (lead generation, extracting contact information, or social media. )
Pricing: ScrapingBee’s price plans start at $29/m.
BrightData is an open-source web scraper for data extraction. It is a data collector providing an automated and customized flow of data.
Data unblocker
No-code, open-source proxy management
Search engine crawler
Proxy API
Browser extension
Capterra Rating: 4. 9/5
Pricing: Pricing varies based on the selected solutions: Proxy Infrastructure, Data Unblocker, Data Collector, and sub-features. Check the website for detailed info.
Start to Scrape with BrightData
Developed to produce data scraping solutions, Grepsr can help your lead generation programs, as well as competitive data collection, news aggregation, and financial data collection. Web scraping for lead generation or lead scraping enables you to extract email addresses.
Did you know that using popups is also a super easy and effective way to generate leads? With Popupsmart popup builder, you can create attractive subscription popups, set up advanced targeting rules, and simply collect leads from your website.
Plus, there is a free version.
Build your first popup in 5 minutes.
Now for Grepsr, let’s take a look at the tool’s outstanding features.
Lead generation data
Pricing & competitive data
Financial & market data
Distribution chain monitoring
Any custom data requirements
API ready
Social media data and more
Pricing: Price plans start at $199/Source. It is a bit expensive so this could be a drawback. Still, it is up to your business needs.
Scraper API is a proxy API for web scraping. This tool helps you manage proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs, so you can get the HTML from any web page by making an API call.
Fully customizable (request headers, request type, IP geolocation, headless browser)
Unlimited bandwidth with speeds up to 100Mb/s
40+ million IPs
12+ geolocations
Pricing: Paid plans start at $29/m however, the lowest-cost plan does not include geotargeting and JS rendering, and it is limited.
The startup plan ($99/m) includes only the US geolocating and no JS rendering. To benefit from all geolocating and JS rendering, you need to purchase the $249/m business plan.
Another one in our list of the best web scraping tools is Scrapy. Scrapy is an open-source and collaborative framework designed to extract data from websites. It is a web scraping library for Python developers who want to build scalable web crawlers.
This tool is completely free.
Web scraping tool helps to collect data at a scale. It offers operational management of all your web data while providing accuracy, completeness, and reliability.
offers a builder to form your own datasets by importing the data from a specific web page and then exporting the extracted data to CSV. Also, it allows building 1000+ APIs based on your requirements.
comes as a web tool along with free apps for Mac OS X, Linus, and Windows.
While provides useful features, this web scraping tool has some drawbacks as well, which I should mention.
Capterra rating: 3. 6/5. The reason for such a low rating is its cons. Most users complain about the lack of support and too expensive costs.
Pricing: Price on application through scheduling a consultation.
I tried to list the best web scraping tools that will ease your online data extraction workload. I hope you find this post helpful when deciding on a data scraper. Do you have any other web scraper tools that you use and suggest? I’d love to hear. You can write in the comments.
Suggested articles:
10 Best Image Optimization Tools & CDNs to Increase Website Speed
10 Best LinkedIn Email Extractor and Finder Tools
Top 21 CRO Tools to Boost Conversions and UX (Free & Paid)
Thank you for your time.
Web Scraping 101: 10 Myths that Everyone Should Know | Octoparse
1. Web Scraping is illegal
Many people have false impressions about web scraping. It is because there are people don’t respect the great work on the internet and use it by stealing the content. Web scraping isn’t illegal by itself, yet the problem comes when people use it without the site owner’s permission and disregard of the ToS (Terms of Service). According to the report, 2% of online revenues can be lost due to the misuse of content through web scraping. Even though web scraping doesn’t have a clear law and terms to address its application, it’s encompassed with legal regulations. For example:
Violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)
Violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
Trespass to Chattel
Misappropriation
Copy right infringement
Breach of contract
Photo by Amel Majanovic on Unsplash
2. Web scraping and web crawling are the same
Web scraping involves specific data extraction on a targeted webpage, for instance, extract data about sales leads, real estate listing and product pricing. In contrast, web crawling is what search engines do. It scans and indexes the whole website along with its internal links. “Crawler” navigates through the web pages without a specific goal.
3. You can scrape any website
It is often the case that people ask for scraping things like email addresses, Facebook posts, or LinkedIn information. According to an article titled “Is web crawling legal? ” it is important to note the rules before conduct web scraping:
Private data that requires username and passcodes can not be scrapped.
Compliance with the ToS (Terms of Service) which explicitly prohibits the action of web scraping.
Don’t copy data that is copyrighted.
One person can be prosecuted under several laws. For example, one scraped some confidential information and sold it to a third party disregarding the desist letter sent by the site owner. This person can be prosecuted under the law of Trespass to Chattel, Violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and Misappropriation.
It doesn’t mean that you can’t scrape social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. They are friendly to scraping services that follow the provisions of the file. For Facebook, you need to get its written permission before conducting the behavior of automated data collection.
4. You need to know how to code
A web scraping tool (data extraction tool) is very useful regarding non-tech professionals like marketers, statisticians, financial consultant, bitcoin investors, researchers, journalists, etc. Octoparse launched a one of a kind feature – web scraping templates that are preformatted scrapers that cover over 14 categories on over 30 websites including Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, eBay, Instagram and more. All you have to do is to enter the keywords/URLs at the parameter without any complex task configuration. Web scraping with Python is time-consuming. On the other side, a web scraping template is efficient and convenient to capture the data you need.
5. You can use scraped data for anything
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. Besides, repackaging scraped content as your own without citing the source is not ethical as well. You should follow the idea of no spamming, no plagiarism, or any fraudulent use of data is prohibited according to the law.
Check Below Video: 10 Myths About Web Scraping!
6. A web scraper is versatile
Maybe you’ve experienced particular websites that change their layouts or structure once in a while. Don’t get frustrated when you come across such websites that your scraper fails to read for the second time. There are many reasons. It isn’t necessarily triggered by identifying you as a suspicious bot. It also may be caused by different geo-locations or machine access. In these cases, it is normal for a web scraper to fail to parse the website before we set the adjustment.
Read this article: How to Scrape Websites Without Being Blocked in 5 Mins?
7. You can scrape at a fast speed
You may have seen scraper ads saying how speedy their crawlers are. It does sound good as they tell you they can collect data in seconds. However, you are the lawbreaker who will be prosecuted if damages are caused. It is because a scalable data request at a fast speed will overload a web server which might lead to a server crash. In this case, the person is responsible for the damage under the law of “trespass to chattels” law (Dryer and Stockton 2013). If you are not sure whether the website is scrapable or not, please ask the web scraping service provider. Octoparse is a responsible web scraping service provider who places clients’ satisfaction in the first place. It is crucial for Octoparse to help our clients get the problem solved and to be successful.
8. API and Web scraping are the same
API is like a channel to send your data request to a web server and get desired data. API will return the data in JSON format over the HTTP protocol. For example, Facebook API, Twitter API, and Instagram API. However, it doesn’t mean you can get any data you ask for. Web scraping can visualize the process as it allows you to interact with the websites. Octoparse has web scraping templates. It is even more convenient for non-tech professionals to extract data by filling out the parameters with keywords/URLs.
9. The scraped data only works for our business after being cleaned and analyzed
Many data integration platforms can help visualize and analyze the data. In comparison, it looks like data scraping doesn’t have a direct impact on business decision making. Web scraping indeed extracts raw data of the webpage that needs to be processed to gain insights like sentiment analysis. However, some raw data can be extremely valuable in the hands of gold miners.
With Octoparse Google Search web scraping template to search for an organic search result, you can extract information including the titles and meta descriptions about your competitors to determine your SEO strategies; For retail industries, web scraping can be used to monitor product pricing and distributions. For example, Amazon may crawl Flipkart and Walmart under the “Electronic” catalog to assess the performance of electronic items.
10. Web scraping can only be used in business
Web scraping is widely used in various fields besides lead generation, price monitoring, price tracking, market analysis for business. Students can also leverage a Google scholar web scraping template to conduct paper research. Realtors are able to conduct housing research and predict the housing market. You will be able to find Youtube influencers or Twitter evangelists to promote your brand or your own news aggregation that covers the only topics you want by scraping news media and RSS feeds.
Source:
Dryer, A. J., and Stockton, J. 2013. “Internet ‘Data Scraping’: A Primer for Counseling Clients, ” New York Law Journal. Retrieved from
Frequently Asked Questions about web scraping tools
Which tool is best for web scraping?
12 Best Web Scraping Tools in 2021 to Extract Online DataDiffbot.Octoparse.ScrapingBee.BrightData (Luminati)Grepsr.Scraper API.Scrapy.Import.io.More items…
Is Web scraping legal?
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
What are Web scraping tools used for?
Web scraping tools are specially developed software for extracting useful information from the websites. These tools are helpful for anyone who is looking to collect some form of data from the Internet.Oct 20, 2021
