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Web scraping, web crawling, html scraping, and any other form of web data extraction can be complicated. Between obtaining the correct page source, to parsing the source correctly, rendering javascript, and obtaining data in a usable form, there’s a lot of work to be done. Different users have very different needs, and there are tools out there for all of them, people who want to build web scrapers without coding, developers who want to build web crawlers to crawl large sites, and everything in between. Here is our list of the 10 best web scraping tools on the market right now, from open source projects to hosted SAAS solutions to desktop software, there is sure to be something for everyone looking to make use of web data!
1. Scraper API
The Web Scraper can also scrape data from any part of a web page. Whether it is the content of an HTML element such as a div or span, CSS value, or HTML element attribute. Any web page meta data or text stored in an image, XML, JSON or PDF. It also uses machine learning to automatically understand concepts. Scrapingbee is a web scraping API that handles headless browsers and proxy.
Web Scrape Script
Website: https://www.scraperapi.com/
Who is this for: Scraper API is a tool for developers building web scrapers, it handles proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs so developers can get the raw HTML from any website with a simple API call.
Why you should use it: Scraper API is a tool for developers building web scrapers, it handles proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs so developers can get the raw HTML from any website with a simple API call. It doesn’t burden you with managing your own proxies, it manages its own internal pool of over a hundreds of thousands of proxies from a dozen different proxy providers, and has smart routing logic that routes requests through different subnets and automatically throttles requests in order to avoid IP bans and CAPTCHAs. It’s the ultimate web scraping service for developers, with special pools of proxies for ecommerce price scraping, search engine scraping, social media scraping, sneaker scraping, ticket scraping and more! If you need to scrape millions of pages a month, you can use this form to ask for a volume discount.
2. ScrapeSimple
Website: https://www.scrapesimple.com
Who is this for: ScrapeSimple is the perfect service for people who want a custom scraper built for them. Web scraping is made as simple as filling out a form with instructions for what kind of data you want.
Why you should use it: ScrapeSimple lives up to its name with a fully managed service that builds and maintains custom web scrapers for customers. Just tell them what information you need from which sites, and they will design a custom web scraper to deliver the information to you periodically (could be daily, weekly, monthly, or whatever) in CSV format directly to your inbox. This service is perfect for businesses that just want a html scraper without needing to write any code themselves. Response times are quick and the service is incredibly friendly and helpful, making this service perfect for people who just want the full data extraction process taken care of for them.
3. Octoparse
Website: https://www.octoparse.com/
Who is this for: Octoparse is a fantastic tool for people who want to extract data from websites without having to code, while still having control over the full process with their easy to use user interface.
Why you should use it: Octoparse is the perfect tool for people who want to scrape websites without learning to code. It features a point and click screen scraper, allowing users to scrape behind login forms, fill in forms, input search terms, scroll through infinite scroll, render javascript, and more. It also includes a site parser and a hosted solution for users who want to run their scrapers in the cloud. Best of all, it comes with a generous free tier allowing users to build up to 10 crawlers for free. For enterprise level customers, they also offer fully customized crawlers and managed solutions where they take care of running everything for you and just deliver the data to you directly.
4. ParseHub
Website: https://www.parsehub.com/
Who is this for: Parsehub is an incredibly powerful tool for building web scrapers without coding. It is used by analysts, journalists, data scientists, and everyone in between.
Why you should use it: Parsehub is dead simple to use, you can build web scrapers simply by clicking on the data that you want. It then exports the data in JSON or Excel format. It has many handy features such as automatic IP rotation, allowing scraping behind login walls, going through dropdowns and tabs, getting data from tables and maps, and much much more. In addition, it has a generous free tier, allowing users to scrape up to 200 pages of data in just 40 minutes! Parsehub is also nice in that it provies desktop clients for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, so you can use them from your computer no matter what system you’re running.
5. Scrapy
Website: https://scrapy.org
Who is this for: Scrapy is a web scraping library for Python developers looking to build scalable web crawlers. It’s a full on web crawling framework that handles all of the plumbing (queueing requests, proxy middleware, etc.) that makes building web crawlers difficult.
Why you should use it: As an open source tool, Scrapy is completely free. It is battle tested, and has been one of the most popular Python libraries for years, and it’s probably the best python web scraping tool for new applications. It is well documented and there are many tutorials on how to get started. In addition, deploying the crawlers is very simple and reliable, the processes can run themselves once they are set up. As a fully featured web scraping framework, there are many middleware modules available to integrate various tools and handle various use cases (handling cookies, user agents, etc.).
6. Diffbot
Website: https://www.diffbot.com
Who is this for: Enterprises who who have specific data crawling and screen scraping needs, particularly those who scrape websites that often change their HTML structure.
Why you should use it: Diffbot is different from most page scraping tools out there in that it uses computer vision (instead of html parsing) to identify relevant information on a page. This means that even if the HTML structure of a page changes, your web scrapers will not break as long as the page looks the same visually. This is an incredible feature for long running mission critical web scraping jobs. While they may be a bit pricy (the cheapest plan is $299/month), they do a great job offering a premium service that may make it worth it for large customers.
7. Cheerio
Website: https://cheerio.js.org
Who is this for: NodeJS developers who want a straightforward way to parse HTML. Those familiar with jQuery will immediately appreciate the best javascript web scraping syntax available.
Why you should use it: Cheerio offers an API similar to jQuery, so developers familiar with jQuery will immediately feel at home using Cheerio to parse HTML. It is blazing fast, and offers many helpful methods to extract text, html, classes, ids, and more. It is by far the most popular HTML parsing library written in NodeJS, and is probably the best NodeJS web scraping tool or javascript web scraping tool for new projects.
8. BeautifulSoup
Website: https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/
Who is this for: Python developers who just want an easy interface to parse HTML, and don’t necessarily need the power and complexity that comes with Scrapy.
Why you should use it: Like Cheerio for NodeJS developers, Beautiful Soup is by far the most popular HTML parser for Python developers. It’s been around for over a decade now and is extremely well documented, with many web parsing tutorials teaching developers to use it to scrape various websites in both Python 2 and Python 3. If you are looking for a Python HTML parsing library, this is the one you want.
9. Puppeteer
Website: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer
Who is this for: Puppeteer is a headless Chrome API for NodeJS developers who want very granular control over their scraping activity.
Why you should use it: As an open source tool, Puppeteer is completely free. It is well supported and actively being developed and backed by the Google Chrome team itself. It is quickly replacing Selenium and PhantomJS as the default headless browser automation tool. It has a well thought out API, and automatically installs a compatible Chromium binary as part of its setup process, meaning you don’t have to keep track of browser versions yourself. While it’s much more than just a web crawling library, it’s often used to scrape website data from sites that require javascript to display information, it handles scripts, stylesheets, and fonts just like a real browser. Note that while it is a great solution for sites that require javascript to display data, it is very CPU and memory intensive, so using it for sites where a full blown browser is not necessary is probably not a great idea. Most times a simple GET request should do the trick!
10. Mozenda
Website: https://www.mozenda.com/
Who is this for: Enterprises looking for a cloud based self serve webpage scraping platform need look no further. With over 7 billion pages scraped, Mozenda has experience in serving enterprise customers from all around the world.
Why you should use it: Mozenda allows enterprise customers to run web scrapers on their robust cloud platform. They set themselves apart with the customer service (providing both phone and email support to all paying customers). Its platform is highly scalable and will allow for on premise hosting as well. Like Diffbot, they are a bit pricy, and their lowest plans start at $250/month.
Honorable Mention 1. Kimura
Website: https://github.com/vifreefly/kimuraframework
Who is this for: Kimura is an open source web scraping framework written in Ruby, it makes it incredibly easy to get a Ruby web scraper up and running.
Why you should use it: Kimura is quickly becoming known as the best Ruby web scraping library, as it’s designed to work with headless Chrome/Firefox, PhantomJS, and normal GET requests all out of the box. It’s syntax is similar to Scrapy and developers writing Ruby web scrapers will love all of the nice configuration options to do things like set a delay, rotate user agents, and set default headers.
Honorable Mention 2. Goutte
Website: https://github.com/FriendsOfPHP/Goutte
Who is this for: Goutte is an open source web crawling framework written in PHP, it makes it super easy extract data from the HTML/XML responses using PHP.
Why you should use it: Goutte is a very straight forward, no frills framework that is considered by many to be the best PHP web scraping library, as it’s designed for simplicity, handling the vast majority of HTML/XML use cases without too much additional cruft. It also seamlessly integrates with the excellent Guzzle requests library, which allows you to customize the framework for more advanced use cases.
The open web is by far the greatest global repository for human knowledge, there is almost no information that you can’t find through extracting web data. Because web scraping is done by many people of various levels of technical ability and know how, there are many tools available that service everyone from people who don’t want to write any code to seasoned developers just looking for the best open source solution in their language of choice.
Hopefully, this list of tools has been helpful in letting you take advantage of this information for your own projects and businesses. If you have any web scraping jobs you would like to discuss with us, please contact us here. Happy scraping!
Monday, January 18, 2021Web scraping (also termed web data extraction, screen scraping, or web harvesting) is a technique of extracting data from the websites. It turns unstructured data into structured data that can be stored into your local computer or a database.
It can be difficult to build a web scraper for people who don’t know anything about coding. Luckily, there are tools available for people with or without programming skills. Also, if you're seeking a job for big data developers, using web scraper definitely raises your working effectiveness in data collection, improving your competitiveness. Here is our list of 30 most popular web scraping tools, ranging from open-source libraries to browser extension to desktop software.
Table of Content
1. Beautiful Soup
Who is this for: developers who are proficient at programming to build a web scraper/web crawler to crawl the websites.
Why you should use it: Beautiful Soup is an open-source Python library designed for web-scraping HTML and XML files. It is the top Python parsers that have been widely used. If you have programming skills, it works best when you combine this library with Python.
2. Octoparse
Who is this for: People without coding skills in many industries, including e-commerce, investment, cryptocurrency, marketing, real estate, etc. Enterprise with web scraping needs.
Why you should use it: Octoparse is free for life SaaS web data platform. You can use to scrape web data and turns unstructured or semi-structured data from websites into a structured data set. It also provides ready to use web scraping templates including Amazon, eBay, Twitter, BestBuy, and many others. Octoparse also provides web data service that helps customize scrapers based on your scraping needs.
3. Import.io
Who is this for: Enterprise looking for integration solution on web data.
Why you should use it: Import.io is a SaaS web data platform. It provides a web scraping solution that allows you to scrape data from websites and organize them into data sets. They can integrate the web data into analytic tools for sales and marketing to gain insight from.
4. Mozenda
Who is this for: Enterprise and business with scalable data needs.
Why you should use it: Mozenda provides a data extraction tool that makes it easy to capture content from the web. They also provide data visualization services. It eliminates the need to hire a data analyst.
5. Parsehub
Who is this for: Data analyst, Marketers, and researchers who lack programming skills.
Why you should use it: ParseHub is a visual web scraping tool to get data from the web. You can extract the data by clicking any fields on the website. It also has an IP rotation function that helps change your IP address when you encounter aggressive websites with anti-scraping techniques.
6. Crawlmonster
Who is this for: SEO and marketers
Why you should use it: CrawlMonster is a free web scraping tool. It enables you to scan websites and analyze your website content, source code, page status, etc.
7. ProWebScraper
Who is this for: Enterprise looking for integration solution on web data.
Why you should use it: Connotate has been working together with Import.io, which provides a solution for automating web data scraping. It provides web data service that helps you to scrape, collect and handle the data.
8. Common Crawl
Who is this for: Researchers, students, and professors.
Why you should use it: Common Crawl is founded by the idea of open source in the digital age. It provides open datasets of crawled websites. It contains raw web page data, extracted metadata, and text extractions.
9. Crawly
Who is this for: People with basic data requirements.
Why you should use it: Crawly provides automatic web scraping service that scrapes a website and turns unstructured data into structured formats like JSON and CSV. They can extract limited elements within seconds, which include Title Text, HTML, Comments, DateEntity Tags, Author, Image URLs, Videos, Publisher and country.
10. Content Grabber
Who is this for: Python developers who are proficient at programming.
Why you should use it: Content Grabber is a web scraping tool targeted at enterprises. You can create your own web scraping agents with its integrated 3rd party tools. It is very flexible in dealing with complex websites and data extraction.
11. Diffbot
Who is this for: Developers and business.
Why you should use it: Diffbot is a web scraping tool that uses machine learning and algorithms and public APIs for extracting data from web pages. You can use Diffbot to do competitor analysis, price monitoring, analyze consumer behaviors and many more.
12. Dexi.io
Who is this for: People with programming and scraping skills.
Why you should use it: Dexi.io is a browser-based web crawler. It provides three types of robots — Extractor, Crawler, and Pipes. PIPES has a Master robot feature where 1 robot can control multiple tasks. It supports many 3rd party services (captcha solvers, cloud storage, etc) which you can easily integrate into your robots.
13. DataScraping.co
Who is this for: Data analysts, Marketers, and researchers who're lack of programming skills.
Why you should use it: Data Scraping Studio is a free web scraping tool to harvest data from web pages, HTML, XML, and pdf. The desktop client is currently available for Windows only.
Web Scraper Online
14. Easy Web Extract
Who is this for: Businesses with limited data needs, marketers, and researchers who lack programming skills.
Why you should use it: Easy Web Extract is a visual web scraping tool for business purposes. It can extract the content (text, URL, image, files) from web pages and transform results into multiple formats.
15. FMiner
Who is this for: Data analyst, Marketers, and researchers who're lack of programming skills.
Why you should use it: FMiner is a web scraping software with a visual diagram designer, and it allows you to build a project with a macro recorder without coding. The advanced feature allows you to scrape from dynamic websites use Ajax and Javascript.
16. Scrapy
Who is this for: Python developers with programming and scraping skills
Why you should use it: Scrapy can be used to build a web scraper. What is great about this product is that it has an asynchronous networking library which allows you to move on to the next task before it finishes.
17. Helium Scraper
Who is this for: Data analysts, Marketers, and researchers who lack programming skills.
Why you should use it: Helium Scraper is a visual web data scraping tool that works pretty well especially on small elements on the website. It has a user-friendly point-and-click interface which makes it easier to use.
18. Scrape.it
Who is this for: People who need scalable data without coding.
Why you should use it: It allows scraped data to be stored on the local drive that you authorize. You can build a scraper using their Web Scraping Language (WSL), which is easy to learn and requires no coding. It is a good choice and worth a try if you are looking for a security-wise web scraping tool.
19. ScraperWiki
Who is this for: A Python and R data analysis environment. Ideal for economists, statisticians and data managers who are new to coding.
Why you should use it: ScraperWiki consists of 2 parts. One is QuickCode which is designed for economists, statisticians and data managers with knowledge of Python and R language. The second part is The Sensible Code Company which provides web data service to turn messy information into structured data.
20. Scrapinghub
Who is this for: Python/web scraping developers
Scrape Web Data
Why you should use it: Scraping hub is a cloud-based web platform. It has four different types of tools — Scrapy Cloud, Portia, Crawlera, and Splash. It is great that Scrapinghub offers a collection of IP addresses covering more than 50 countries. This is a solution for IP banning problems.
21. Screen-Scraper
Who is this for: For businesses related to the auto, medical, financial and e-commerce industry.
Why you should use it: Screen Scraper is more convenient and basic compared to other web scraping tools like Octoparse. It has a steep learning curve for people without web scraping experience.
22. Salestools.io
Who is this for: Marketers and sales.
Why you should use it: Salestools.io is a web scraping tool that helps salespeople to gather data from professional network sites like LinkedIn, Angellist, Viadeo.
23. ScrapeHero
Who is this for: Investors, Hedge Funds, Market Analysts
Why you should use it: As an API provider, ScrapeHero enables you to turn websites into data. It provides customized web data services for businesses and enterprises.
24. UniPath
Who is this for: Bussiness in all sizes.
Why you should use it: UiPath is a robotic process automation software for free web scraping. It allows users to create, deploy and administer automation in business processes. It is a great option for business users since it helps you create rules for data management.
25. Web Content Extractor
Who is this for: Data analysts, Marketers, and researchers who're lack of programming skills.
Why you should use it:Web Content Extractor is an easy-to-use web scraping tool for individuals and enterprises. You can go to their website and try its 14-day free trial.
26. WebHarvy
Who is this for: Data analysts, Marketers, and researchers who lack programming skills.
Why you should use it: WebHarvy is a point-and-click web scraping tool. It’s designed for non-programmers. They provide helpful web scraping tutorials for beginners. However, the extractor doesn’t allow you to schedule your scraping projects.
27. Web Scraper.io
Who is this for: Data analysts, Marketers, and researchers who lack programming skills.
Why you should use it: Web Scraper is a chrome browser extension built for scraping data from websites. It’s a free web scraping tool for scraping dynamic web pages.
28. Web Sundew
Who is this for: Enterprises, marketers, and researchers.
Why you should use it: WebSundew is a visual scraping tool that works for structured web data scraping. The Enterprise edition allows you to run the scraping projects at a remote server and publish collected data through FTP.
29. Winautomation
Who is this for: Developers, business operation leaders, IT professionals
Why you should use it: Winautomation is a Windows web scraping tool that enables you to automate desktop and web-based tasks.
30. Web Robots
How To Web Scrape Python
Who is this for: Data analysts, Marketers, and researchers who lack programming skills.
Why you should use it: Web Robots is a cloud-based web scraping platform for scraping dynamic Javascript-heavy websites. It has a web browser extension as well as desktop software, making it easy to scrape data from the websites.
Closing Thoughts
Scrape Web Page
To extract data from websites with web scraping tools is a time-saving method, especially for those who don't have sufficient coding knowledge. There are many factors you should consider when choosing a proper tool to facilitate your web scraping, such as ease of use, API integration, cloud-based extraction, large-scale scraping, scheduling projects, etc. Web scraping software like Octoparse not only provides all the features I just mentioned but also provides data service for teams in all sizes - from start-ups to large enterprises. You can contact usfor more information on web scraping.
Online Web Scrape
Ashley is a data enthusiast and passionate blogger with hands-on experience in web scraping. She focuses on capturing web data and analyzing in a way that empowers companies and businesses with actionable insights. Read her blog here to discover practical tips and applications on web data extraction 日本語記事：スクレイピングツール30選｜初心者でもWebデータを抽出できる |