Web scraping, web crawling, html scraping, and any other form of web data extraction can be complicated. Between obtaining the correct page source, to parsing the source correctly, rendering javascript, and obtaining data in a usable form, there’s a lot of work to be done. Different users have very different needs, and there are tools out there for all of them, people who want to build web scrapers without coding, developers who want to build web crawlers to crawl large sites, and everything in between. Here is our list of the 10 best web scraping tools on the market right now, from open source projects to hosted SAAS solutions to desktop software, there is sure to be something for everyone looking to make use of web data!
How to use Web Scraper? There are only a couple of steps you will need to learn in order to master web scraping: 1. Install Web Scraper and open Web Scraper tab in developer tools (which has to be placed at the bottom of the screen for Web Scraper to be visible); 2. Create a new sitemap; 3. Add data extraction selectors to the sitemap; 4. Collecting data from websites using an automated process is known as web scraping. Some websites explicitly forbid users from scraping their data with automated tools like the ones you’ll create in this tutorial. Websites do this for two possible reasons: The site has a good reason to protect its data.
1. Scraper API
Website: https://www.scraperapi.com/
Who is this for: Scraper API is a tool for developers building web scrapers, it handles proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs so developers can get the raw HTML from any website with a simple API call.
Why you should use it: Scraper API is a tool for developers building web scrapers, it handles proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs so developers can get the raw HTML from any website with a simple API call. It doesn’t burden you with managing your own proxies, it manages its own internal pool of over a hundreds of thousands of proxies from a dozen different proxy providers, and has smart routing logic that routes requests through different subnets and automatically throttles requests in order to avoid IP bans and CAPTCHAs. It’s the ultimate web scraping service for developers, with special pools of proxies for ecommerce price scraping, search engine scraping, social media scraping, sneaker scraping, ticket scraping and more! If you need to scrape millions of pages a month, you can use this form to ask for a volume discount.
2. ScrapeSimple
Website: https://www.scrapesimple.com
Who is this for: ScrapeSimple is the perfect service for people who want a custom scraper built for them. Web scraping is made as simple as filling out a form with instructions for what kind of data you want.
Why you should use it: ScrapeSimple lives up to its name with a fully managed service that builds and maintains custom web scrapers for customers. Just tell them what information you need from which sites, and they will design a custom web scraper to deliver the information to you periodically (could be daily, weekly, monthly, or whatever) in CSV format directly to your inbox. This service is perfect for businesses that just want a html scraper without needing to write any code themselves. Response times are quick and the service is incredibly friendly and helpful, making this service perfect for people who just want the full data extraction process taken care of for them.
3. Octoparse
Website: https://www.octoparse.com/
Who is this for: Octoparse is a fantastic tool for people who want to extract data from websites without having to code, while still having control over the full process with their easy to use user interface.
Why you should use it: Octoparse is the perfect tool for people who want to scrape websites without learning to code. It features a point and click screen scraper, allowing users to scrape behind login forms, fill in forms, input search terms, scroll through infinite scroll, render javascript, and more. It also includes a site parser and a hosted solution for users who want to run their scrapers in the cloud. Best of all, it comes with a generous free tier allowing users to build up to 10 crawlers for free. For enterprise level customers, they also offer fully customized crawlers and managed solutions where they take care of running everything for you and just deliver the data to you directly.
4. ParseHub
Website: https://www.parsehub.com/
Who is this for: Parsehub is an incredibly powerful tool for building web scrapers without coding. It is used by analysts, journalists, data scientists, and everyone in between.
Why you should use it: Parsehub is dead simple to use, you can build web scrapers simply by clicking on the data that you want. It then exports the data in JSON or Excel format. It has many handy features such as automatic IP rotation, allowing scraping behind login walls, going through dropdowns and tabs, getting data from tables and maps, and much much more. In addition, it has a generous free tier, allowing users to scrape up to 200 pages of data in just 40 minutes! Parsehub is also nice in that it provies desktop clients for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, so you can use them from your computer no matter what system you’re running.
5. Scrapy
Website: https://scrapy.org
Who is this for: Scrapy is a web scraping library for Python developers looking to build scalable web crawlers. It’s a full on web crawling framework that handles all of the plumbing (queueing requests, proxy middleware, etc.) that makes building web crawlers difficult.
Why you should use it: As an open source tool, Scrapy is completely free. It is battle tested, and has been one of the most popular Python libraries for years, and it’s probably the best python web scraping tool for new applications. It is well documented and there are many tutorials on how to get started. In addition, deploying the crawlers is very simple and reliable, the processes can run themselves once they are set up. As a fully featured web scraping framework, there are many middleware modules available to integrate various tools and handle various use cases (handling cookies, user agents, etc.).
6. Diffbot
Website: https://www.diffbot.com
Who is this for: Enterprises who who have specific data crawling and screen scraping needs, particularly those who scrape websites that often change their HTML structure.
Why you should use it: Diffbot is different from most page scraping tools out there in that it uses computer vision (instead of html parsing) to identify relevant information on a page. This means that even if the HTML structure of a page changes, your web scrapers will not break as long as the page looks the same visually. This is an incredible feature for long running mission critical web scraping jobs. While they may be a bit pricy (the cheapest plan is $299/month), they do a great job offering a premium service that may make it worth it for large customers.
7. Cheerio
Website: https://cheerio.js.org
Who is this for: NodeJS developers who want a straightforward way to parse HTML. Those familiar with jQuery will immediately appreciate the best javascript web scraping syntax available.
Why you should use it: Cheerio offers an API similar to jQuery, so developers familiar with jQuery will immediately feel at home using Cheerio to parse HTML. It is blazing fast, and offers many helpful methods to extract text, html, classes, ids, and more. It is by far the most popular HTML parsing library written in NodeJS, and is probably the best NodeJS web scraping tool or javascript web scraping tool for new projects.
8. BeautifulSoup
Website: https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/ Best logo making app for mac.
Who is this for: Python developers who just want an easy interface to parse HTML, and don’t necessarily need the power and complexity that comes with Scrapy.
Why you should use it: Like Cheerio for NodeJS developers, Beautiful Soup is by far the most popular HTML parser for Python developers. It’s been around for over a decade now and is extremely well documented, with many web parsing tutorials teaching developers to use it to scrape various websites in both Python 2 and Python 3. If you are looking for a Python HTML parsing library, this is the one you want.
9. Puppeteer
Website: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer
Who is this for: Puppeteer is a headless Chrome API for NodeJS developers who want very granular control over their scraping activity.
Why you should use it: As an open source tool, Puppeteer is completely free. It is well supported and actively being developed and backed by the Google Chrome team itself. It is quickly replacing Selenium and PhantomJS as the default headless browser automation tool. It has a well thought out API, and automatically installs a compatible Chromium binary as part of its setup process, meaning you don’t have to keep track of browser versions yourself. While it’s much more than just a web crawling library, it’s often used to scrape website data from sites that require javascript to display information, it handles scripts, stylesheets, and fonts just like a real browser. Note that while it is a great solution for sites that require javascript to display data, it is very CPU and memory intensive, so using it for sites where a full blown browser is not necessary is probably not a great idea. Most times a simple GET request should do the trick!
10. Mozenda
Website: https://www.mozenda.com/
Who is this for: Enterprises looking for a cloud based self serve webpage scraping platform need look no further. With over 7 billion pages scraped, Mozenda has experience in serving enterprise customers from all around the world.
Why you should use it: Mozenda allows enterprise customers to run web scrapers on their robust cloud platform. They set themselves apart with the customer service (providing both phone and email support to all paying customers). Its platform is highly scalable and will allow for on premise hosting as well. Like Diffbot, they are a bit pricy, and their lowest plans start at $250/month.
Honorable Mention 1. Kimura
Website: https://github.com/vifreefly/kimuraframework
Who is this for: Kimura is an open source web scraping framework written in Ruby, it makes it incredibly easy to get a Ruby web scraper up and running.
Why you should use it: Kimura is quickly becoming known as the best Ruby web scraping library, as it’s designed to work with headless Chrome/Firefox, PhantomJS, and normal GET requests all out of the box. It’s syntax is similar to Scrapy and developers writing Ruby web scrapers will love all of the nice configuration options to do things like set a delay, rotate user agents, and set default headers.
Honorable Mention 2. Goutte
Web Scraping Different Websites Free
Website: https://github.com/FriendsOfPHP/Goutte
Who is this for: Goutte is an open source web crawling framework written in PHP, it makes it super easy extract data from the HTML/XML responses using PHP.
Why you should use it: Goutte is a very straight forward, no frills framework that is considered by many to be the best PHP web scraping library, as it’s designed for simplicity, handling the vast majority of HTML/XML use cases without too much additional cruft. It also seamlessly integrates with the excellent Guzzle requests library, which allows you to customize the framework for more advanced use cases.
Web Scraping Tutorial
The open web is by far the greatest global repository for human knowledge, there is almost no information that you can’t find through extracting web data. Because web scraping is done by many people of various levels of technical ability and know how, there are many tools available that service everyone from people who don’t want to write any code to seasoned developers just looking for the best open source solution in their language of choice.
Web Scraping Online
Hopefully, this list of tools has been helpful in letting you take advantage of this information for your own projects and businesses. If you have any web scraping jobs you would like to discuss with us, please contact us here. Happy scraping!