Web scraping can be useful for various purposes such as market research, data analysis, content aggregation, price comparison, monitoring websites for changes and many more. Let's consider the 14 best web scraping tools for data extraction in 2023.
Table of Contents
What is Web Scraping?
Top 14 Web Scraping Tools
Web Scraping As A Powerful Tool
Web Scraping Tools FAQ
What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is a technique used to automatically extract data from oman whatsapp number data 5 million websites. It involves writing a program or using a tool to access and retrieve information from web pages, typically in a structured format such as HTML or XML. Web scraping tools allow users to collect large amounts of data from multiple websites, which can then be analyzed, processed, or used for various purposes.
Free Plan: Offers limited features and allows 10 crawlers.
Standard Plan: It costs around $75 per month. This package allows unlimited crawlers, IP rotations, and API access.
Professional Plan: Costs around $209 per month. This package is for large-scale data extraction and includes all the features of the standard plan, plus priority queue, high-speed extraction, and more.
Main Features
Data Export: Octoparse supports exporting the extracted data to various formats, such as CSV, Excel, HTML, TXT and databases (MySQL, SQL Server and Oracle).
Advanced Regular Expression Tool: This tool helps handle more complex data scraping situations.
Web Scraping Templates: Octoparse provides pre-formatted templates for scraping data from specific sites like Amazon, eBay, Twitter, etc.
Captcha Solution: It can automatically handle some types of CAPTCHA during the scraping process.
Pro
IP Rotation;
Advanced Data Extraction;
Scheduled Extraction;
Extended Export Options.
Against
Limitations with Dynamic Websites;
Speed;
Limited Captcha Solution.
Assessment
Reviews
2. Scrapbook
Prices
Scrapy is an open-source framework used for web scraping in Python. As an open-source web scraping tool, it is free for anyone to download and use.
Main Features
Embedded Following Links: Scrapy can automatically follow links based on rules you set, which helps in navigation for data extraction.
Command Line Tool: It offers a command line tool to control the scraping process. The tool provides commands to create new projects, spider, parse URLs, etc.
Robust Data Processing Pipelines: Provides powerful ways to clean and validate extracted data using its pipelines.
Built-in HTTP Features: The scraping tool supports features like authentication, cookie management, retrying failed requests, and more.
Data Export: Provides built-in support for outputting collected data into various formats such as JSON, XML and CSV.
Pro
Extensibility;
Community and Support;
Data Export.
Against
Less Intuitive for Single Page Applications;
No GUI;
Requires Installation and Maintenance.
Assessment
Reviews
3. ParseHub
Prices
Free Plan: ParseHub's free plan offers limited functionality and allows you to process 200 pages per run and 5 public projects.
Standard Plan: This plan costs around $189 per month and allows up to 10,000 pages per run and 20 private projects.
Professional Plan: This plan costs around $599 per month and offers unlimited pages per run and 120 private projects.
Enterprise Plan: For larger businesses or custom needs, the web scraping tool offers an Enterprise plan, which provides more significant data extraction capabilities, excellent support, and customized solutions. The price for this plan has not been listed and is likely negotiable based on the specific needs of the user.
Main Features
Data Export: Supports exporting collected data to various formats, including CSV, Excel and JSON, or via their API.
API Access: Provides an API that you can use to manage and run your projects programmatically.
Multiple Page Viewing: With web scraping software, you can set rules to follow links and navigate between multiple pages for complete data extraction.
Conditional Logic: ParseHub allows you to implement conditional logic into your scraping setup, allowing you to handle various scraping situations.
Cloud Based: It is a cloud-based tool, which means you can set your projects to run and then shut down your computer without interrupting the data extraction process.
Pro
Programmable Executions;
Cloud Based;
Advanced Selectors.
Against
API Access;
Speed;
Limited Free Plan.
Assessment
Reviews
4. Import.io
Prices
Starter Package: Designed for small businesses and individual users with basic web scraping needs.
Standard Package: Designed to retrieve information from interactive websites and overcome CAPTCHAs and login barriers.
Advanced Package: Developed to extract large volumes of data efficiently, meeting top priority use cases with broad support.
Custom: Intended for large enterprises with high-volume data extraction needs and requirements for advanced features and priority support.
Main Features
Data Quality Assurance: Offers data quality assurance capabilities, ensuring that the data you are collecting is accurate and complete.
Scheduling and Automation: Web scraping software allows you to schedule scraping tasks to run at specific intervals, which is useful for projects that require regular data updates.
API Access: Provides an API that you can use to manage and run your projects programmatically or to directly integrate the extracted data into your applications.
Webhooks: Webhooks enable real-time data delivery, sending your data to your endpoint as soon as it is ready.
Pro
Planning and Automation;
API Access;
Cloud based.
Against
Price;
Learning curve;
Customer support.
Assessment
Reviews
5. Web Scraper
Price
Web Scraper Browser Extension: This is a free tool available as a browser extension for Chrome. It allows you to set up and run small to medium-sized scraping tasks in your browser.
Project: $50 per month.
Professional: $100 per month.
Business: $200 per month.
Scale: From $300 per month.
Main Features
Multi-Page Scraping: Web Scraper can crawl multiple pages of a website to extract data, even handling sites that use infinite scroll.
Sitemap-Based Structure: A web scraping tool structures your scraping project as a sitemap, where you can define which pages to navigate, what data to extract, and how the pages are interconnected.
Data Export: Web Scraper supports exporting collected data into various formats, including CSV.
Cloud-Based Scraping: With the cloud service (a paid feature), you can increase the volume of your scraping tasks and run them on Web Scraper's servers, saving your computer's resources.
Pro
Multi-Page Support and Infinite Scrolling;
Cloud Based Scraping;
Data Export.
Against
Limited Features in Free Version;
No JavaScript Rendering in Free Version;
Learning curve.
Assessment
Reviews
6. Beautiful Soup
Prices
Beautiful Soup is an open-source Python library used for web scraping, extracting data from HTML and XML files. It is freely available for use and modification. There is no cost to use Beautiful Soup.
As with any open-source tool, while the library itself is free, there may be associated costs depending on how you use it. For example, you may need to invest time learning how to use the library or pay for compute resources if you are doing large-scale data extractions.
Main Features
Easy Navigation: The web scraping tool transforms a complex HTML document into a tree of Python objects, such as tags, navigable strings, or comments. You can navigate through this tree and find the data you need.
Parse Tree Search: Beautiful Soup provides Pythonic methods and idioms for searching the parse tree. You can filter elements by their tags, attributes, text content, or relationship to other elements.
Parse Tree Editing: Web scraping software allows you to edit the parse tree or individual elements in it. This means you can change tag names and attribute values, add new tags, modify .string and .contents, use replace_with() and insert(), and more.
Parse Tree Printing: Provides methods for cleanly printing the parse tree with or without formatting.
Parsing Filters: Supports complex patterns and methods to search the parsing tree. You can use a function, regular expression, list, or string to filter during a search.
Pro
Open Source;
Well Documented;
Community.
Against
Requires Programming Knowledge;
Speed;
No JavaScript support.
Assessment
Reviews
7. Selenium
Prices
Selenium is a free and open-source framework for automated testing, used to validate web applications on different browsers and platforms. It is free to use, but you can also modify its source code to suit your needs, thanks to its open-source nature.
That said, while Selenium is free, there may be indirect costs associated with its use:
Time for Learning and Development.
Infrastructure Costs.
Support Costs.
Main Features
Selenium Grid: Web scraping software allows parallel testing, where different tests can be run simultaneously on different remote machines. This helps reduce the time required to run parallel tests and get faster feedback.
Integration with other Tools: It can be easily integrated with tools like TestNG and JUnit for test case management and report generation. This tool can also be integrated with Maven, Jenkins and Docker for continuous testing.
Community Support: It has a large user base and an active community, making it easy to find help and resources for learning and troubleshooting.
Open Source: Being an open-source web scraping tool, Selenium is free and allows users to extend and modify the source code to suit their needs.
