Digital Life,Internet,Services,Tools & Utilities

17 Best Web Scraping Tools For Every Need

17-Best-Web-Scraping-Tools-For-Every-Need

Web scraping also called web harvesting or web data extraction is a method of extracting data from other websites. The data extracted from other websites will be processed and formatted according to their requirements, including data research, price monitoring, a news feed, and lead generation, etc.

Web scraping or data extraction can be done manually or using automated tools like a web crawler or a bot. Using these web scraping tools, one can extract a huge amount of data and download it in various formats including CSV, Excel, or XML.

Web scraping tools are available in the market as:

  • Browser Extension tools
  • Installable Software
  • Cloud-based extraction tools.

In this article, we’ll explore the best web scraping tools to suit your various requirements.

1. Scraper APIweb scraping tool

Scraper API - web scraping tool

If you are looking to crawl large websites like Amazon or eBay to collect huge content, then Scraper API is the best web scraping tool you need to look for. It is one of the best web scraping tools in the market, that can grab data in quick time.

Using a residential IP network, the API addresses used by Scraper API are very hard to detect and cannot be blocked easily. One of the major highlights of this scraping tool is that they can solve captchas too.

Mostly websites make use of captchas to differentiate between real people and automation tools and bots. With the ability to solve captchas, that problem is solved with the use of Scraper API.

The API is completely easy to use and highly customizable as well according to your scraping requirements.

You will never get blocked because it rotates IP addresses with each request, from a pool of millions of proxies across over a dozen ISPs, and automatically retries failed requests, also solves captcha’s for you.

Scraper API is easy to use and fully customizable; it allows you to customize request headers, request type, IP geolocation, and more with literally no effort.

Pros:

  • Automatic rotation of IP addresses
  • Contains more the 20 million residential IP addresses
  • Fully customizable API
  • Easily solves captchas too
  • Dedicated support channel provided with enterprise plans

Cons:

  • Only ideal for web scraping tasks

Pricing:

Comes with 4 paid plans including:

  • Free Trial              –      Available
  • Hobby                  –        $29
  • Startup                 –       $99
  • Business               –       $249
  • Enterprise             –      Custom pricing

Platform:

Scraper API offers a Restful API that can be accessed through HTTP easily

2. Octoparseweb scraping tool

Octoparse web scraping tool

The second web scraping tool for review is the free web scraper, Octoparse. It comes loaded with a lot of powerful features that you would only expect in a paid tool. The web scraping tools also provides support for both Windows and MacOS platforms.

Compared with other free tools available in the market, the offering provided by Octoparse looks to be quite generous. Yes, it offers free unlimited pages. One of the highlights of this tool is that it the scraping process is extremely quick and easy to complete.

Even if you are not experience with programming, you can still use this tool as no coding experience is required to use this web scraping tool.

Pros:

  • Automatic IP rotation
  • No programming experience required
  • Download data in various formats including CSV, Excel and API formats
  • Easily schedule your scraping tasks

Cons:

  • Confusing user interface

Pricing:

  • Free Plan              –        Available
  • Standard               –        $75
  • Professional          –       $209
  • Enterprise             –       Custom pricing

Platform:

  • Supports both Windows and MacOS

3. Scraping-Bot

Next on our list of the best web scraping tools for every need is Scraping-Bot. It is a highly powerful and effective web scraping tool that helps your extract data from other websites without any issues.

One of the highlights of Scraping-Bot is that it comes with separate scraping APIs for various sectors including Real estate, Retail, Raw HTML and Prestashop module etc. The data is extracted, parsed, and delivered in structured JSON for further use.

The website also provides a detailed documentation to get started with the API. There is also a Live Test environment provided to test the functionality of the API.

Pros:

  • Affordable pricing
  • Readymade API for different sectors
  • Supports both browsers and proxies
  • Supports JS rendering
  • Geotargeting

Cons:

  • Only ideal for web scraping tasks

Pricing:

  • Free Trial              –       Available
  • Freelancer            –       $39
  • Startup                 –        $99
  • Business               –        $299
  • Enterprise            –       $649

API / Interface:

Scraping-Bot offers specialized API for different sectors.

4. X-tract.io

Xtract.io is another highly powerful web scraping tool that allows website owners and marketers to extract a huge quantity of scalable data extraction.

The API can be easily customized according to your needs to scrape any kind of data including pricing data, historical data, social media content, structured web content etc.

The API is quite simple, effective and easy to use. FinXtract is a specialized tool that is offered for the financial sector to extract financial data.

Pros:

  • Powerful API
  • Cloud-based API
  • Easily integrate with your applications
  • Data extraction automation
  • Uses rotating proxies to bypass captchas

Cons:

  • No free trial available

Pricing:

  • Free Trial              –        Not Available
  • Pricing                  –        Only quote-based pricing

API / Interface:

Cloud-based API provides support for Windows, MacOS

5. Import.io

Import.io allows you to extract large chunks of datasets from various websites. Considered as one of the best tools available for data extraction and integration with your existing applications using customizable APIs and webhooks. It also provides support for integration with various programming languages and analytical tools.

Import.io is a SaaS web data integration platform, which allows people to convert semi-structured web data in web pages into structured data. It offers real-time data retrieval through our JSON REST-based and streaming APIs, and integrates with many programming languages and data analysis tools.

Pros:

  • Saas-based data extraction platform
  • Easily convert unstructured data into easy-to-use structured data
  • Streaming API
  • Email, IP address, pricing, phone number extraction etc

Cons:

  • Not affordable for small businesses and single user extraction

Pricing:

  • Only Quote-based pricing

6. Wintr

Next on our list of the best web scraping tools for 2021 is Wintr. It is a highly effective and powerful tool that makes use of rotating residential proxies to avoid getting blocked.

With Wintr, you can easily scrap any kind of data and convert into JSON format. The website also provides extensive documentation to help you get started with the data extraction process quickly.

Pros:

  • Easy to use API
  • Easily customizable according to your requirements
  • Affordable pricing
  • Unhindered data extraction
  •  

Cons:

  • Free plan comes with very little features

Pricing:

Comes with 6 paid plans including:

  • Free Trial              –        Available
  • Bronze                  –        $20
  • Silver                    –        $40
  • Gold                     –        $80
  • Platinum               –       $150
  • Diamond              –        $300
  • Pay As You Go     –        $500 (minimum)

API / Interface:

API available in Bash, PHP, NodeJS and Python

7. Webhose.io

Webhose.io offers real-time data extraction and provides direct access to the huge amount of structured data from various websites. One of the highlights of this web scraping tool is that provides direct access to historical data feed with more than 8-10 years of data.

Pros:

  • Machine readable data extraction
  • Easily convert unstructured data into readable data
  • JSON and XML format data output
  • Advanced filter to analyze data feeds

Cons:

  • Searches the dark web too

Pricing:

  • Free Trial              –        Available
  • Pricing                  –        Quote-based pricing

8. Scrapinghub

Next in our list of the best web scraping tools for all your data extraction requirements is Scrapinghub. It is a highly effective, open-source data extraction tool. One of the highlights of this tool is that it can easily handle more than 3million pages/month.

It also supports automatic data extraction and allows for easier management of web crawlers using Scrapy Cloud. When compared with other web scraping tools, Scrapinghub doesn’t use IP rotation, but still gets the job done without getting banned.

Pros:

  • Ideal for data scientists
  • Large scale data extraction
  • Free project assessment done
  • GDPR compliance review provided

Cons:

  • Not adequate documentation
  • Not ideal for beginners

Pricing:

  • Free Trial    –        Available
  • Pricing        –        Quote-based pricing

API / Interface:

Cloud-based API

9. Dexi Intelligent

As the name suggests, Dexi Intelligent is truly an intelligent web scraping tool that provides unhindered data extraction services. The extracted data can be store in CSV or JSON formats, or you can even store in your Google Drive account.

Pros:

  • High-level of accuracy
  • Quick data extraction
  • Large scale data extraction
  • Advanced product analytics and monitoring

Cons:

  • Not ideal for beginners
  • Steep learning curve

Pricing:

Comes with 4 paid plans including:

  • Only quote-based pricing

10. ParseHub

If you are looking for the cheapest web scraping tools, then you need to check out ParseHub. With the free plan, you can easily extract 200 pages in every run and you can create 5 public projects too.

Pros:

  • Easy to use
  • Excellent customer support
  • Affordable pricing

Cons:

  • Only limited features in the free plan

Pricing:

  • Free Trial              –        Available
  • Standard               –        $149
  • Professional          –        $499
  • Enterprise             –        Custom pricing

API / Interface:

ParseHub offers REST API.

11. Mozenda

Next on our list is Mozenda, a high-speed data extraction tool. It allows you to extract all kinds of data including text, images, and other content from websites.

Pros:

  • Action items
  • Extremely Quick
  • Error handling features
  • XPath compatibility

Cons:

  • Only available for Windows platform

Pricing:

  • Free Trial                        –        Available
  • Project                            –        Custom pricing
  • Professional                    –      Custom pricing
  • Corporate                       –        Custom pricing
  • Managed Services          –       Custom pricing

API / Interface:

REST API

12. FMiner

FMiner is basically a downloadable data extraction software that provides easy web harvesting and data extraction services. It provides support for both Windows and Mac OS platforms.

The user interface is extremely easy to use and you don’t need any programming interface to make use of this tool. The software also can extract data from web 2.0 sites that employ advanced JavaScript and Ajax etc.

Pros:

  • Intuitive user interface
  • Downloadable software
  • No coding required
  • Easy to use
  • Nested data elements

Cons:

  • Steep learning curve to use advanced features

Pricing:

  • Free Trial              –       Available
  • Basic                    –        $168
  • Pro                        –        $248
  • Pro for MacOS      –      $228

API / Interface:

Downloadable GUI software

13. Content Grabber

If you are looking for a visual, point and click interface for easy data extraction, then better checkout Content Grabber. It is another highly renowned and reliable data extraction tool.

People with programming knowledge can tweak this tool to fulfill all their web scraping requirements.

Pros:

  • Supports both Windows and Linux
  • Supports debug and error handling
  • Ideal for large scale data extraction

Cons:

  • Not available for MacOS

Pricing:

Comes with 4 paid plans including:

  • Free Trial              –        Not Available
  • Server                   –        $69
  • Professional          –      $149
  • Premium               –       $299

API / Interface:

Downloadable software

14. OutWitHub

OutWitHub is another highly effective web scraping tool that requires no programming skills to extract data from other websites. Previously, it was offered as a Firefox add-on, but now, they provide a downloadable software for easy extraction.

With OutWitHub, you can extract all kinds of data and convert into various data formats like CSV, XML or SQL

Pros:

  • Quick and easy data extraction
  • No coding skill required

Cons:

  • No extensive documentation available

Pricing:

  • Free Trial              –       Available
  • Pro                        –        $95
  • Expert                  –        $245
  • Enterprise             –      $745

API / Interface:

Downloadable software

15. 80legs

The next web scraping tool in our list is 80legs. It is a cloud-based scraping tool that uses IP rotation to prevent from getting blocked. There is also no rate limiting issues with 80legs.

All you need to do is just provide the URL list, set the crawl limit and relax. The crawling and data extraction will get completed automatically

Pros:

  • Cloud based
  • Supports giant web crawl

Cons:

  • No advanced crawl features available

Pricing:

  • Free Trial              –       Available
  • Intro                     –        $29
  • Plus                      –        $99
  • Premium               –      $299
  • Enterprise             –      Custom pricing

API / Interface:

Cloud-based data extraction tool

16. Apify

As the name suggests, people looking to transform a website into API data can make use of Apify web scraping tool With Apify, you can schedule your web scraping tasks like cron-job in linux.

crawling and data extraction will get completed automatically

Pros:

  • Ideal for large scale scraping
  • Excellent community support

Cons:

  • No IP rotation

Pricing:

  • Free Trial              –       Available
  • Personal               –       $44
  • Team                    –       $449
  • Business               –      $899
  • Enterprise             –      Custom pricing

API / Interface:

JavaScript-based API

17. DiffBot

Last but not least, DiffBot is another high-quality web scraping tool that uses API for data extraction purposes. One of the highlights of this tool is that employs Machine Language (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for data analysis and extraction.

Pros:

  • Easy integration
  • Advanced extraction features ML, NLP etc
  • Supports custom APIs

Cons:

  • Expensive

Pricing:

  • Free Trial              –       Available
  • Startup                 –        $299
  • Plus                      –        $899
  • Enterprise             –       Custom pricing

API / Interface:

Cloud-based API

Conclusion

When it comes to web scraping and data extraction, one can find a lot of tools available. Most of the tools work perfectly for small-time data extraction and one-off extraction works. But if you are looking for large scale data extraction, then you need to go for commercial web scraping tools. Only with paid scraping services, you can achieve unhindered data extraction and get excellent support as well.

Hope the above list provided for the best web scraping tools for every need has satisfied your needs and queries on finding the right web scraping tool. If you find any tool missed out, or want to suggest a new tool, you are always welcome to suggest.

Sudipta Gupta

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