More than 5 billion users generate an enormous amount of data every second, with almost 90% of the data being unstructured. Web intelligence is important for search engines to index all that unstructured data to provide relevant results. And if previously you had to collect this data manually, fill web pages with product information or a database with contacts, today this process is automated with the help of web scraping.
Web scraping is the technique to quickly retrieve and store any data in a structured form from some other website. And there are multiple ways to do web scraping. The easiest one is to use a special web scraping tool that helps you in that purpose.
In this post, we’re going to list the top 13 web scraping tools for different purposes. Some of these are free, while others are paid. Even some need to be installed on your system while many work as a browser extension as well.
Why Use Web Scraping Tools?
There are many different ways to use web scrapers that you can extract, analyze, and employ as you need. Scraping simplifies the data extraction process and speeds it up by automating it. Here are some more widespread ways.
Market Research
Data extraction tools can help keep track of a company’s situation, providing a powerful foundation for market research. Scraping software can obtain data from multiple data analytics providers and from market research firms to use the information for their purposes.
Contact Information Extraction
Parsing tools can be used to collect and organize data about customers, suppliers, or vendors, such as mailing addresses, contact information from various websites, and social networks to compile lists of contacts and all related information for the business.
Financial Data
For example, analysts need financial reports to determine a company’s condition and to make recommendations to clients to invest or not to invest in it. Manually obtaining a lot of company information over many years is difficult. Therefore, web scraping tools are used to extract financial statements for different periods to analyze and make investment decisions based on them.
Job & Employee Search
Web scraping will be an indispensable helper for both the employer looking for candidates for a job and the job seeker looking for a position. The tools will help you customize filtered data sampling to get the information you need.
Tracking Prices at Various Stores
Scraping tools will be useful both for those who actively use online shopping services and track prices of products in several stores at once, as well as for companies that monitor the pricing of competitors’ products. You might have seen comparison websites like smartprix.com or 91mobile. These sites show the price comparison for different products on their website. All these can be done with the data scraped.
Insurance
Insurance companies study data to identify risks, etc., to develop their products and policies. But they can’t collect data manually all the time, so they use Web scraping to collect alternative data and make decisions about insurance products and policies.
5 Factors to Consider When Choosing Web Scraping Tools
With the growing popularity of using web scraping, more and more high-tech companies are creating their own tools. As a result, a wide range of tools has emerged, and finding the right one for you can seem like an overwhelming task. There are several factors to consider before choosing the right one.
Data Quality
Of course, it is extremely important to analyze the quality of the data collected, because most of the information on the Internet is unstructured and needs to be cleaned up before usage. And the quality of the data significantly affects the analysis and conclusions. A good web scraping tool will organize the data and give it to you in a structured format.
Data Delivery
The choice of tool also depends on the format of the data in which it is delivered. For example, if the data must be provided in JSON format, the search for tools is narrower. To be on the safe side, it’s better to choose a vendor that delivers data in a wide range of formats, because in some cases you may need to deliver content in unfamiliar formats.
Scalability
The tool must be scalable and adaptable to the future needs of the organization because data collection needs will grow over time, and the web scraper itself must not slow down. So a vendor with an advanced infrastructure will make any necessary changes with minimal effort on the part of your organization.
Price
Although price is not the main factor in choosing a tool, it should also be taken into account. Do not choose a tool that does not fit the nature of your business, because you will waste money and not be able to use the tool for its intended purpose. Choose the tool that best suits your business.
Customer Support
If you face a problem while running a web scraping tool, you may need help. So this is where customer support becomes one of the important factors in choosing a good tool. With a great service, you won’t have to worry if something goes wrong, as the service providers should have customer support as a priority.
Top 13 Best Web Scraping Tools
Based on the experience we had with a few tools and reviews, here is the curated list of top 13 web scraping tools you can use.
Scrape-it.Cloud
Scrape-it.Cloud is a web scraping API with proxy rotation. The tool offers fully advanced web scraping services for various industries and has great features. Scrape-it.Cloud is easy to use. All you have to do is choose a target link from which you want to collect the necessary information, send a POST request and get your data in JSON format.
Most importantly, the entire scraping process is legal and will not create problems with the policies and rules of the sites from which the information is collected.
Features: Ability to collect data from dynamic sites, Chrome page rendering, AI blocking bypass, fast API integration, data transmission over secure channels, Javascript execution
Advantages: easy to use, ongoing support, fast-acting, affordable pricing, follows full legal compliance, captcha problem solved.
Disadvantages: few reviews
Price: tariffs start at $30/month
Bright Data Collector
Bright data collector is an amazing tool to crawl any website automatically. This helps you get an automated and customized flow of data in one simple location in the form of a dashboard. By getting the data in the visualized form, you can focus on insight generation and take actions that are fruitful for your business.
It comes as a browser extension that means you just need to install it in your browser and then whatever website you want to crawl, simply click on the extension. All you have to do is, just provide your keyword and request for the data. The receiver will automatically collect and deliver the dynamic dataset to you. The best thing is, Luminati takes care of validation methodologies and focuses on your preferences.
Features: data unblocker, allows to manage open source proxies, has a search engine scanner, over 35 million resident peer-to-peer IP addresses available in almost every location in the world, no limitations in terms of session number, can be accessed through an API or browser extension
Advantages: provides a data collector code editor, ability to schedule the workflow on frequency, collection window, and delivery time, offer different kinds of proxy
Disadvantages: bad offers for individuals and medium-sized companies, asks for a $500 minimum monthly commitment, focal point are big corporations and nothing else, service is of mixed quality, overpaying for limited bandwidth
Price: free trial account, after you can choose any of the paid plans, popular resident proxies cost from $10 per GB
ProWebScrapper
ProWebScrapper is one of the best web scraping tools available providing scalable and seamless services. You can get clean and actionable data that can be further used to generate insights.
Features: scheduling, URL generator, pagination, automated data delivery, and more
Advantages: ease of use, quick data collection, analyze a lot of data in a few minutes
Disadvantages: needs adjustments in the scraper in order to make it work properly with the help of the support team
Price: free scraping of 1,000 pages with access to all features, low rate starts at $40 for scraping 5,000 pages
webscraper.io
Webscraper.io is one of the web scraper tools in the form of a browser extension which helps getting the desired data. With around 250k users, webscraper.io enables you to even get the data from the dynamic websites.
Currently, it’s available for the Google Chrome browser and helps to export the data in the CSV file. You can even automate the extraction process by scheduling it.
Features: helps to create a map of the site to navigate the site and determine the information that will be processed, the plugin can handle multiple JS and Ajax pages simultaneously, the ability to schedule regular cleaning with alternating IP-addresses
Advantages: good for scraping detailed information from limited web pages such as multiple product categories or blog posts, easy to do from the Chrome browser
Disadvantages: can’t handle complex web scraping scenarios
Price: free in browser and paid for cloud crawling, tariffs start at $50/month
data-miner.io
Data-miner.io is another web scraping tool available in the form of a chrome extension. You can download and install it in your browser and access it from the desktop. You can scrap the desired data as per your choice and download it in either an excel sheet or a CSV file. The data will be secured and you don’t need any proxy for data scraping with data-miner.io. Also, you can do scraping automation and make it run on schedule.
Features: convenient browser extension, provides ready-made scraping requests optimized for popular tasks, scalable services on cloud servers for large projects and enterprises
Advantages: no coding, easy to use, have privacy, custom scraping and form filling automation
Disadvantages: not suitable for large amounts of data collectionPrice: free for scanning 500 pages per month, for more you can sign up for a paid plan starting at $49 per month
Scrapy.org
Scrapy is a powerful and reliable web scraping and crawling framework which is managed by Scrapinghub and other contributors. The best thing about Scrapy is, it’s an open-source framework for extracting the data you need from the website based on your requirements. You can download Scrapy either on your system or on ScrapyCloud.
Features: open source tool, well documented, easily extensible, simple and reliable deployment
Advantages: fast and powerful, ability to plug in new features without affecting the core, cloud-based environment to run scrapers
Disadvantages: for people with technical skills
Price: free
Scraper
Scraper is another chrome extension used for web scraping. It has been developed by a freelancer who has an account on GitHub with the user-id- dvhtn. One issue that I found with Scraper is, it has not been updated for long. Scraper allows you to scrap the data into spreadsheets and export as required. This is a basic web scraping chrome extension and is recommended for the research purpose only.
Features: copy data to clipboard, scraping from dynamic multiple pages and data extraction types like text, images, URL’s, and more), browsing scraped data
Advantages: free and simple data mining extension
Disadvantages: limited data mining extension, a tool for intermediate and advanced users who are familiar with XPathPrice: free
webhose.io
Webhose.io is another modern web data scraping tool helping you to get the desired data quickly. It also helps you convert the unstructured data to machine-readable content as needed. With the help of webhose.io, you can get historical data, blogs, reviews, pricing for financial analysis, market research, media & web monitoring and more very easily.
Features: standardized, machine-readable data sets in JSON and XML formats, access to the data repository at no additional cost, and the ability to perform detailed analysis
Advantages: easy to use, coordinated between data providers
Disadvantages: has some learning curve, not for organizationsPrice: 1000 requests as a trial, premium plan starts at $39 per month for 1000 requests
OutWit.com
OutWit is another leading web scraping software available to harvest the web. It’s a data extractor built-in web browser. But if you want to use this as a browser extension, you may download it from Mozilla Firefox add-ons. It helps you extract the web data without any coding skills and suits best for the data harvesting. You can use outwit for extracting the data related to news, ads, SEO, social networking sites data, contacts, job search, and more.
Features: recognize and retrieve links, email addresses, structured and unstructured data, retrieve and download images and documents, text with a dictionary of words and word groups by frequency, browse web pages using user-defined search rules
Advantages: requires no programming knowledge, simple graphical interface
Disadvantages: nonePrice: $45 per year or $69 for a one-time purchase
FMiner.com
FMiner is a visual web scraping software with a micro recorder and diagram designer. It helps you with web scraping, web data extraction, screen scraping, web harvesting, web crawling, and more. The best thing about FMiner is, it is available for both Windows and MAC systems. It has a visual editor using which you can design what all fields you need and it takes not more than 10 minutes to extract the data from any URL.
Features: extract web pricing data, images, IP addresses, phone numbers, documents, sparse data and email addresses
Advantages: easy-to-use, intuitive interface, don’t need to have any prior coding knowledge, support the extraction from dynamic websites
Disadvantages: very expensive, UI is bit oldPrice: $168 for Windows and $228 for MAC
PySpider
If you’re a technical person or have someone who can handle this then PySpider can be the top web crawler tool choice. It is a web crawler tool written in Python and supports JavaScript pages in a distributed architecture. With PySpider, you can run multiple crawlers as well and for the database, you may use MongoDB, MySQL, Redis, etc. to store the data.
Features: WebUI with script editor, task monitor, project manager and results viewer, RabbitMQ, Beanstalk, Redis and Kombu as message queue, distributed architecture
Advantages: has one of the best user interfaces, helps you easily manage tasks, current activities, etc., the ability to save data in a CSV file or in JSON, supports heavy AJAX sites
Disadvantages: for people with technical skillsPrice: free
Apify SDK
Apify SDK is a web scraping tool and web crawling library for JavaScript and Node.js. It runs on JavaScript and can automate any workflow. You can either use Apify SDK locally on your system or on the cloud. If you want to clear information from a fashion website, for example, Apify will provide information based on colors, prices, and product sizes.
Features: easy management of lists and URL queues for crawling, high performance due to parallel running of crawlers, suitable for web scraping websites with javascript support
Advantages: provide data as APIs and in various formats, rich open-source SDK, platform available as APIs to connect to your own software, scheduling via the cloud
Disadvantages: a bit technical, difficult to navigatePrice: free
Parsehub.com
Parsehub is another leading web scraping tool and in fact one of the most powerful web crawling software as well. You can download the Parsehub desktop app and choose the site to scrape. Then you can select the data which needs to be scrapped. And finally, when the data is ready, you can access it via JSON, Excel file, or by an API.
Features: quick select feature, ParseHub API, built for interactive and complicated websites, split-second feedback loop, seamless navigation between pages, automatic IP rotation
Advantages: easy to use, quickly scrapes super modern pages, scales up to enterprise level
Disadvantages: free limited services, dynamic InterfacePrice: scraping 200 pages for free, if you need more, you can buy the premium version, which costs $149 per month
Conclusion
These were the top 13 web scraping tools that you can use to scrape the data from the web. These top data extraction software or web crawling software can help you when you need some small set of data from other websites. Do try any of these and get the desired data in minutes.
Source: Plato Data Intelligence: PlatoData.io