There are various scenarios where you may need massive volumes of data from the web, such as while training a machine learning model or performing data mining to accomplish a specific business goal.
However, copying and pasting large volumes of data sets from websites seems a tiresome task, right?
Well, web scraping handles everything, from loading and extracting data from multiple websites to converting it into a usable format. Web scraping has made web data extraction easier than ever before. This article will help you with the best Web Scraping Tools to extract data.
A galore of web scraping tools are available in the market. Choosing the right web scraping tool or web scraper is quite important as a web scraper plays a vital role in data extraction. A good web scraping tool must execute several tasks, such as effectively parsing the web page, rendering Javascript, getting data in a readable manner, and much more.
If you are searching for the best web scraping tool, you have landed at the right place. We've made it easier for you to choose the right web scraper as we have listed some of the most popular web scrapers in this article. Also, we shall walk you through some significant factors that you must look into while selecting a web scraper.
Prior to it, let us get a brief overview of web scraping.
What is Web Scraping ?
Web scraping, also referred to as web harvesting and web data extraction is a technique of extracting sheer amounts of data from websites automatically. The data collected from websites is generally unstructured or in an HTML format. It is then converted into structured or usable data and stored in spreadsheets or loaded into a database for various purposes.
The two crucial elements of web scraping are crawler and scraper. The crawler leverages an artificial intelligence algorithm to browse the web, search for particular data, and load it using the URL provided. On the other hand, the scraper is responsible for parsing, extracting data from the website, and copying it into a spreadsheet or load into a database.
There is a wide range of applications of web scraping, such as web indexing, web mining and data mining , product review scraping, product price change monitoring, price comparison, weather data monitoring, gathering real estate listings, and many more.
Factors to Consider When Choosing a Web Scraping Tools
A web scraper is a tool or computer program that performs web scraping. You can find a wide range of web scraping tools on the internet, and hence, it becomes tricky to choose the best one. The following are some factors that you must consider while choosing a web scraping tool:
- Scalability: Scalability plays a crucial role when it comes to data scraping. Your web scraper should not slow down when your demand for data increases. Therefore, make sure to choose a web scraping tool that is highly scalable.
- Transparent Pricing: The tool you choose for web scraping should provide a transparent pricing structure. Meaning that there should not be any hidden cost. Every detail about pricing should be made clear at the beginning.
- Data Delivery: Data delivery is one of the most significant factors to consider while selecting a web scraping tool. Every tool uses different data formats to deliver the extracted data. Therefore, ensure that the tool you choose provides data in your desired format. However, it is always better to choose a tool that provides various data delivery formats, such as JSON, CSV, or XML.
- Data Cleaning and Organization: The data on the internet is unstructured, and hence, you need to clean it before you put it into use. It is better to choose a web scraper that provides you with the tools required for cleaning and organizing the scraped data.
- Customer Support: It is quite possible that you may face challenges while using a web scraping tool and needs quick assistance. As a result, you should look for a tool that provides you with good customer support.
10 Best Web Scraping Tools to Extract Online Data
Choosing the right web scraping tool that meets your needs is pretty challenging when there are a wide variety of options. Here are the top 10 web scraping tools for you to choose from.
1. ScraperAPI
ScraperAPI is a popular web scraping tool specially intended for developers building web scrapers. You just simply need to send the URL of a website you want to scrape, and ScraperAPI does everything for you and returns an HTML response. With Scraper API, you can scrape any website effortlessly with JavaScript rendering, geotargeting, or residential proxies.
Features
- Scraper API is easy to use and is fully customizable.
- It can handle proxies, browsers, and captcha and provides HTML from any web page with a single API call.
- It provides a unique collection of proxies for social media scraping, eCommerce price scraping, ticket scraping, search engine scraping, sneaker scraping, and many more.
- With ScraperAPI, you do not have to worry about your requests getting blocked since it comes with anti-bot detection and bypassing.
- It automatically removes slow proxies and provides a bandwidth of up to 1000 Mbps.
- It is a highly scalable web scraping tool that never slows down its speed, even if you want to scrape millions of pages.
Pricing
ScrapeAPI offers 5000 free API credits for 7 days. After that, you need to upgrade to one of the four pricing plans listed below:
- Hobby: It charges $25 per month and offers 250,000 API credits and 10 concurrent threads.
- Startup: The plan requires you to pay $99 per month, and it offers 1,000,000 API credits and 25 concurrent threads, along with US geotargeting.
- Business: It charges $249 per month with 3,000,000 API credits and 50 concurrent threads. It comes with 50+ geotargeting, JSON auto parsing, JS rendering, and residential proxies.
- Enterprise: You need to contact sales to know the price of this plan.
Additionally, you get a free 7-day trial with Hobby, Startup, and Business plans.
2. ParseHub
ParseHub is yet another robust web scraping tool that enables you to build web scrapers without the need to write even a single line of code. This web scraping tool caters to all your web scraping needs. Moreover, ParseHub enables you to extract data from millions of web pages and download data in Excel and JSON formats.
Features
- ScraperAPI enables you to collect and store data from any JavaScript and AJAX page.
- It enables you to import the extracted data into Google Sheets and Tableau.
- It is extremely scalable since it enables you to extract millions of data points in minutes without sacrificing speed.
- This tool is ideal for analysts & consultants, sales leads, developers, data scientists, and journalists since it meets all their requirements of web data scraping.
- You can collect data from websites and store it on ScrapeAPI’s servers.
- It provides tools to clean the extracted HTML data before downloading.
Pricing
ParseHub offers four different pricing options, as listed below:
- Everyone: Anyone can use this plan as it is free to use.
- Standard: This plan charges $189 per month. Also, you can cancel the subscription anytime.
- Professional: You need to pay $599 per month to access all the features of this plan.
- ParseHub Plus: To get detailed pricing of ParseHub Plus, you need to contact the vendor.
3. Scrapy
Scrapy is an open-source web scraping library that Python developers typically use to develop robust web scrapers. It is also a comprehensive framework for crawling websites and extracting structured data. It also manages proxy middleware, query requests, etc., and makes the development of web crawlers easy.
Features
- Scrapy is an easy-to-use, fast, and extensible web scraping tool.
- It can extract data using APIs, such as Amazon Associates Web Services, or simply using a general-purpose web crawler.
- This web crawling and web scraping framework serves a variety of purposes, from data mining and information processing to monitoring and automated testing.
- It has excellent documentation, and hence, you can easily learn to use Scrapy.
- Scrapy is written in Python and is compatible with Windows, Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD operating systems.
Pricing
Scrapy is free to use.
4. OctoParse
Like ParseHub, OctoParse enables its users to parse and extract data from the websites, with no coding needed at all. With OctoParse, you can save the data from the desired web pages into structured spreadsheets within a few minutes.
Features
- OctoParse has a simple point-and-click interface that makes web scraping easy.
- You can scrape data from any dynamic website.
- It enables you to download scraped data in a CSV or Excel file or load data into a database.
- With OctoParse, you can schedule web scraping at any specific time, hourly, daily, or weekly.
- It provides automatic IP rotation to prevent your IP from being blocked.
Pricing
OctoParse provides four different pricing plans, namely Free plan, Standard plan, Professional plan, and Enterprise.
- Free Plan: This plan is free to use and is ideal for simple projects.
- Standard Plan: This plan charges $75 per month if billed annually and $89 per month if billed monthly. It is ideal for small teams.
- Professional Plan: This plan is perfect for middle-sized businesses and charges $209 per month if billed annually and $249 per month if billed monthly.
- Enterprise: Contact the vendor to know the pricing of the Enterprise plan.
5. Mozenda
Mozenda is the best solution for enterprises that are looking for a cloud-based and self-serve web scraping platform. This tool has served millions of enterprises across the globe. Data harvesting with Mozenda is 5 times faster than other web scraping tools.
Features
- Point-and-Click: This feature enables you to extract images, text, and PDF content from any website with a few clicks and within a fraction of time.
- Export Data: You can export the extracted data directly to CSV, JSON, XML, XLSX, and TSV through Mozendo’s API .
- Data Wrangling Software: This software converts unstructured and semi-structured data into a highly structured and indexed catalog.
- Data Integration: Mozendo enables you to integrate the extracted data with other business tools, including Asana, AWS S3, Google Cloud, Google Analytics, Trello, Microsoft Azure, Dropbox, and Microsoft Excel.
Pricing
You will get four different pricing options with Mozenda, namely Trial, Standard, Corporate, and Enterprise.
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- Trial: With the Trial plan, you only get one concurrent process and 1.5 hours of free web data extraction.
- Standard: The Standard plan provides one concurrent process and 1 million pages of web data extraction per year.
- Corporate: The Corporate plan provides 3+ concurrent processes and 3 million pages of web data extraction per year.
- Enterprise: The Enterprise plan provides 8+ concurrent processes and 8 million pages of web data extraction per year.
6. BrightData
BrightData is a sophisticated web scraping tool that lets you extract public web data. It provides you with ready-made data sets and also a data collection infrastructure to create your own data sets. It is widely used across various industry verticals, including marketing, finance, travel, retail, and cybersecurity .
Features
- Data Collector: With Data Collector you can easily collect data from any public website. Firstly, you need to choose the website from which you need to extract data. Then, select whether you want to perform the extraction in real-time or schedule the extraction. Finally, get data in the form of Excel, CSV, JSON, or HTML format.
- Web Unlocker: BrightData has incorporated the first automated website unlocking tool that lets users reach their target sites at a great speed. You are just one request away from the most accurate data available on your target site.
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Proxy Networks:
BrightData provides four different proxy networks, namely Residential proxies, ISP proxies, Mobile proxies, and Datacenter proxies.
- Residential Proxies: There are more than 72 million IPs rotated from real-peer devices in 195 countries.
- ISP Proxies: There are 600,000+ real home IPs across the globe.
- Mobile Proxies: You will find more than 7 million IPs from the largest real-peer 3G/4G mobile networks.
- Datacenter Proxies: There are 700,000+ shared data center IPs from any geolocation.
Pricing
To know the pricing, you need to contact the sales team.
7. Diffbot
Diffbot is an enterprise-level solution ideal for companies that have high data crawling and screen scraping needs. It is the best solution to use when you need to scrape websites that frequently change their HTML structure. Instead of HTML parsing, Diffbot uses computer vision to identify information on a web page.
Features
- Knowledge Graph: Search: This feature enables you to extract and develop data feeds of news, organizations, and people.
- Knowledge Graph: Enhance: With this feature, you can enhance your existing datasets of people, news, and organizations.
- Extract: This feature requires you to just paste the desired website’s URL and extract data within a fraction of time. It generates clean and structured data in a CSV or JSON format.
- Crawl: This feature allows you to convert any website into a structured database of all their products, articles, discussions, and reviews in minutes.
Pricing
You can choose from three different pricing plans of Diffbot, namely Startup, Plus, and Enterprise.
- Startup: The Startup plan is ideal for small teams, and it charges $299 per month. It provides 250,000 page extraction credits.
- Plus: The Plus plan is a perfect option for midsize organizations. It charges $899 per month and offers 3 user licenses. It provides 1 million page extraction credits.
- Enterprise: This is a custom plan where you need to contact the vendor for pricing.
8. ScrapingBee
ScrapingBee is another well-known web scraping tool that enables you to focus on extracting data you need without dealing with concurrent headless browsers. It manages thousands of headless instances using Chrome’s latest version. This is a perfect web scraping tool for you if you constantly get blocked while web scraping.
Features
- JavaScript Rendering: ScrapingBee uses only a single parameter to render JavaScript so that you can extract data from every website, even from single-page applications .
- Rotating Proxies: For every new request, ScrapingBee provides new IP from its large proxy pool and hence, reduces the risk of getting blocked.
- Customer Support: ScrapingBee has a team of experts that quickly answer all your queries via live chat or emails.
- Geotargeting: This web scraping tool makes geolocation available for every country but only with premium proxies.
Pricing
ScrapingBee has four different pricing plans, namely Freelance, Startup, Business, and Enterprise.
- Freelance: You need to pay $49 per month to access this plan. It comes with 100,000 API credits and 1 concurrent request.
- Startup: This plan charges $99 per month and comes with 1,000,000 API credits and 10 concurrent requests.
- Business: The Business plan requires you to pay $249 per month. It provides 2,500,000 API credits and 40 concurrent requests.
- Enterprise: This is a custom plan, and you need to contact sales for its pricing details.
9. Scrape.do
Scrape.do is a new generation web scraping tool with powerful proxy services from any location. It allows you to extract data from the target web page in the form of JSON, HTML, and XML with rotating proxies.
Features
- Rotating Proxies: Scrape.do allow you to scrape any website with 20 million proxies. You just have to send a request to an API and Scrape.do will rotate every request using their proxy pool.
- Geotargeting: You can select any country, including the US, Canada, Turkey, and many more, before starting to scrape any website.
- Backconnect Proxy: With this feature, you do not have to worry about being blocked. This is because the API assigns a different IP for each of your access requests.
- Customer Support: Scrape.do experts are ready to help you anytime. You just need to write an email highlighting your query and send them.
- Unlimited Bandwidth: This web scraping tool provides you with unlimited bandwidth.
- JS Rendering: It enables you to render single-page applications easily.
Pricing
Scrape.do offers four different pricing plans, namely Free, Hobby, Pro, and Business.
- Free: This plan is free to use.
- Hobby: This plan charges $29 per month with 5 concurrent requests.
- Pro: You need to pay $99 per month for the Pro plan with 15 concurrent requests.
- Business: This plan requires $249 per month with 40 concurrent requests.
10. WebScraper.io
WebScraper.io is a Google Chrome browser extension for web scraping. However, you can also download the WebScraper.io application on your system. It is an ideal web scraping solution for non-developers who work with smaller data sets. Though this tool is not as feature-rich as all the above web scraping tools, it is user-friendly and has an intuitive interface.
Features
- WebScraper.io has a point-and-click and intuitive interface, which makes web scraping as simple as possible without the need for coding.
- It lets you extract data from dynamic websites. It extracts data from websites with multiple levels of navigation.
- WebScraper.io allows you to build Site Maps from different types of selectors, which in turn enables you to customize data extraction for different site structures.
- You can export the extracted data in CSV, JSON, and XLSX formats. Also, you can export it to Dropbox, Google Sheets, and Amazon S3.
- It supports scheduling a website for scraping on an hourly, daily, and weekly basis.
- It ensures IP rotation through thousands of IP addresses.
Pricing
WebScraper.io’s browser extension is free to use. Its paid services are available in four different plans, as listed below:
- Project: This plan provides 5,000 cloud credits and 2 parallel tasks at $50 per month.
- Professional: You get 20,000 cloud credits and 3 parallel tasks with this plan for $100 per month.
- Business: This plan charges $200 per month for 50,000 cloud credits and 5 parallel tasks.
- Scale: Take advantage of unlimited cloud credits and more than 3 parallel tasks with the Scale plan starting from $300 per month.
Conclusion
That brings us to the end of the list of popular web scraping tools. Each of the aforementioned web scraping tools has its own set of advantages. Some are ideal for enterprises and developers for building their own web scrapers, while others are for non-developers. Therefore, choosing a web scraping tool entirely depends on your requirements. H
opefully, this article has helped you find the best web scraping tool for your project or business. Let us know which web scraping tool you have chosen by posting a comment down below.
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