Web scraping tools are software developed specifically to simplify the process of data extraction from websites. Data extraction is quite a useful and commonly used process however, it also can easily turn into a complicated, messy business and require a heavy amount of time and effort.
So, what does a web scraper do?
A web scraper uses bots to extract structured data and content from a website by extracting the underlying HTML code and data stored in a database.
In data extraction, from preventing your IP from getting banned to parsing the source website correctly, generating data in a compatible format, and to data cleaning, there is a lot of sub-process that goes in. Luckily, web scrapers and data scraping tools make this process easy, fast, and reliable.
In this post, you will find a list of the top 14 best web scraping tools compared based on their features, pricing, and ease-of-use.
14 Best Web Scraping Tools Here's a list of the best web scraping tools:
Web Scraping Tools | Pricing for 1,000,000 API Calls | IP Rotation | JS Rendering | Geolocating |
---|---|---|---|---|
BrightData | Pay-As-You-Go | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Oxylabs | $99/m | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Scrape.do | $99/m | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Scraper API | $99/m | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Scrapingdog | $90/m | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
AvesAPI | $800/m | ✔ | ✘ | ✔ |
Scrape-It.Cloud | $30/m | ✔ | ✔ | ✘ |
ParseHub | $499/m | ✔ | ✔ | ✘ |
Diffbot | $899/m | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Octoparse | $75/m | ✔ | ✔ | ✘ |
ScrapingBee | $99/m | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Grepsr | $999/m | ✔ | ✔ | ✘ |
Scrapy | Free | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ |
Import.io | On application | ✔ | ✔ | ✘ |
Web scraper tools search for new data manually or automatically. They fetch the updated or new data, and then, store them for you to easily access. These tools are useful for anyone trying to collect data from the internet.
For example, web scraping tools can be used to collect real estate data, hotel data from top travel portals, product, pricing, and review data for e-commerce websites, and more. So, basically, if you are asking yourself ‘where can I scrape data,’ it is data scraping tools.
Now, let’s take a look at the list of the best web scraper tools in comparison to answer the question; what is the best web scraping tool?
Bright Data Web Scraper IDE - Designed for developers, built for scale.
The fully hosted IDE, built on our unblocking proxy infrastructure, offers ready-made scraping functions, reducing dev time and ensuring limitless scale.
Features
Capterra Rating: 4.8/5 Bright Data Capterra Reviews
Oxylabs' Web Scraper API is designed to collect real-time public web data from almost any page. It serves as a trustworthy solution for quick and reliable data extraction. As a result, Web Scraper API best fits, but isn't limited to, use cases such as fraud protection, market research, and travel fare monitoring. It gives free trial for one week.
Use POPUP20 code to get 20% off for Residential Proxy & Web Scraping API
Features
G2 Rating: 4.7/5 Oxylabs G2 Reviews
Pricing: Free and paid plans starting at $49/month
Apify is the no-code most powerful web scraping and automation platform.
Features
Capterra Rating: 4.9/5
Pricing: Apify has forever free plan. Personal plan starts with $49.
Scrape.dois 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. As you will see in the continuation of this post, Scrape.do is one of the lowest cost web scraping tools out there.
-Unlike its competitors, Scrape.do does not charge extra for Google and other hard-to-scrape websites.
-It offers the best price/performance ratio in the market for Google scraping (SERP). (5,000,000 SERP for $249)
-Additionally, Scrape.do has 2-3 seconds average speed in collecting anonymous data from Instagram and a 99% success rate.
-Its gateway speed is also 4 times faster than its competitors.
-Moreover, this tool is providing residential and mobile proxy access twice as cheaper.
Here are some of its other features.
Features
Pricing: Price plans start at $29/m. Pro plan is $99/m for 1,300,000 API calls.
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
Pricing: Yes, ParseHub offers a variety of features, but most of them are not included in its free plan. The free plan covers 200 pages of data in 40 minutes and 5 public projects.
Priced plans start at $149/m. So, I can suggest that more features come at a higher cost. If your business is small, it may be best to use the free version or one of the cheaper web scrapers on our list.
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
Pricing: 14-day free trial. Price plans start at $299/m, which is quite expensive and a drawback for the tool. However, it’s up to you to decide whether you need the extra features this tool provides and to evaluate its cost-effectiveness for your business.
Scrape-It.Cloud is a web scraping API that helps users extract data from any website with a simple API call, no proxy required.
With features like automatic proxy rotation, automatic scaling, and Javascript rendering, it simplifies and speeds up web scraping.
In addition to its web scraping API, the service also offers ready-made no-code scrapers that allow users to easily retrieve the data they need in popular formats such as CSV, Excel, and JSON.
These scrapers can be useful for those who do not have programming skills or do not want to write their own scripts from scratch.
Features
Pricing: Scrape-It.Cloud offers a 30-day free trial for all its plans.
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.
Who is it for? Octoparse is best for non-developers who are looking for a friendly interface to manage data extraction processes.
Capterra Rating: 4.6/5
Pricing: Free plan available with limited features. Price plans start at $75/m.
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.
So, they claim dealing with headless browsers as other web scrapers do is time-wasting and eating up your RAM & CPU. What else does ScrapingBee offer?
Features
Pricing: ScrapingBee's price plans start at $29/m.
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
Who is it for? Scrapingdog is for anyone who needs web scraping, from developers to non-developers.
Pricing: Price plans start at $20/m. JS rendering feature is available for at least the standard plan which is $90/m. LinkedIn API available only for the pro plan ($200/m.)
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.
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Now for Grepsr, let’s take a look at the tool’s outstanding features.
Features
Pricing: Price plans start at $199/Source. It is a bit expensive so this could be a drawback. Still, it is up to your business needs.
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
Pricing: Paid plans start at $29/m however, the lowest-cost plan does not include geo-targeting and JS rendering, and it is limited.
The startup plan ($99/m) includes only the US geolocating and no JS rendering. To benefit from all geolocating and JS rendering, you need to purchase the $249/m business plan.
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.
This tool is completely free.
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.
Capterra rating: 3.6/5. The reason for such a low rating is its cons. Most users complain about the lack of support and too expensive costs.
Pricing: Price on application through scheduling a consultation.
I tried to list the best web scraping tools that will ease your online data extraction workload. Another question that includes this topic: Is web scraping unethical? You should also consider it according to legal issues. I hope you find this post helpful when deciding on a data scraper. If you are looking for web scraping api solution you can read our review post also.
Do you have any other web scraper tools that you use and suggest? I'd love to hear. You can write in the comments.
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