The 10 Best Web Scraping Tools

No Comments

The 10 Best Web Scraping Tools

  • 18/11/2019

The 10 Best Web Scraping Tools

  • 18/11/2019

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.

The 10 Best Web Scraping Tools

Different users have very different needs, and there are two way to done this job.

1. Approach a professional Company like Hir Infotech to do Web Scraping and Data Extraction Service job

About Hir Infotech:

Website: https://hirinfotech.com/

Hir Infotech is a reliable solution and service provider for 7 years now, with almost 70% recurring clients. We have 24 highly skilled professionals with vast experience in various types of projects. We have efficiently handled various types of Web Scraping, Data Mining, Custom Crawler, Bot Design and Develop, Data extraction/ conversion, Data Processing, Data Management, Web Research projects with our 400+ clients over 18 countries.

2. Use ready open source tool for Web Crawling and Data Extraction

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!

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 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. Beautiful Soup

Website: https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/

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.

Request a free quote

At Hir Infotech, we know that every dollar you spend on your business is an investment, and when you don’t get a return on that investment, it’s money down the drain. To ensure that we’re the right business with you before you spend a single dollar, and to make working with us as easy as possible, we offer free quotes for your project.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Request a free quote

At Hir Infotech, we know that every dollar you spend on your business is an investment, and when you don’t get a return on that investment, it’s money down the drain. To ensure that we’re the right business with you before you spend a single dollar, and to make working with us as easy as possible, we offer free quotes for your project.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

About us and this blog

We are a digital marketing company with a focus on helping our customers achieve great results across several key areas.

Request a free quote

We offer professional SEO services that help websites increase their organic search score drastically in order to compete for the highest rankings even when it comes to highly competitive keywords.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

More from our blog

See all posts