Web Scraping is an automatic method to obtain large amounts of data from websites. Most of this data is unstructured data in an HTML format which is then converted into structured data in a spreadsheet or a database so that it can be used in various applications. There are many different ways to perform web scraping to obtain data from websites. These include using online services, particular API’s or even creating your code for web scraping from scratch. Many large websites, like Google, Twitter, Facebook, Stack Overflow, etc. have API’s that allow you to access their data in a structured format. This is the best option, but there are other sites that don’t allow users to access large amounts of data in a structured form or they are simply not that technologically advanced. In that situation, it’s best to use Web Scraping to scrape the website for data.
Web Scraping Tools
1. Scrape.do
Scrape.do 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, Scrape.do is on top of the list. Scrape.do is one of the lowest cost web scraping tools out there.
Features
Rotating proxies; allow you to scrape any website. Scrape.do 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.
2. Apify
Apify is the no-code most powerful web scraping and automation platform.
Features
Hundreds of ready-to-use tools
No-code, open-source proxy management
Search engine crawler
Proxy API
Browser extension
3. AvesAPI
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.
4. ParseHub
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.
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
5. Diffbot
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.
Features
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
6. Octoparse
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.
7. ScrapingBee
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.
Features
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.)
8. Scrapingdog
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:
Features
Rotates IP address with each request and bypasses every CAPTCHA for scraping without getting blocked.
Rendering JavaScript
Webhooks
Headless Chrome
9. Grepsr
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.
Features
Lead generation data
Pricing & competitive data
Financial & market data
Distribution chain monitoring
Any custom data requirements
API ready
Social media data and more
10. Scraper API
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.
Features
IP rotation
Fully customizable (request headers, request type, IP geolocation, headless browser)
JavaScript rendering
Unlimited bandwidth with speeds up to 100Mb/s
40+ million IPs
12+ geolocations
11. Scrapy
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.
12. Import.io
Web scraping tool Import.io helps to collect data at a scale. It offers operational management of all your web data while providing accuracy, completeness, and reliability.
Import.io 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.
Import.io comes as a web tool along with free apps for Mac OS X, Linus, and Windows.
While Import.io provides useful features, this web scraping tool has some drawbacks as well, which I should mention.
The Tech Platform
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