Web Scraping (also termed Screen Scraping, Web Data Extraction, Web Harvesting etc.) is a technique employed to extract large amounts of data from websites whereby the data is extracted and saved to a local file in your computer or to a database in table (spreadsheet) format.
Data displayed by most websites can only be viewed using a web browser. They do not offer the functionality to save a copy of this data for personal use. The only option then is to manually copy and paste the data - a very tedious job which can take many hours or sometimes days to complete. Web Scraping is the technique of automating this process, so that instead of manually copying the data from websites, the Web Scraping software will perform the same task within a fraction of the time.
Best Web Scraping Software in Various Categories
Desktop
Cloud / Web based
For Developers
For Desktop (Windows/Mac)
The following software can be installed in your computer (desktop/laptop) to perform web scraping. The advantages of desktop web scraping software are they are economical compared to cloud solutions and you have full control over the data extracted. Mostly suited for consumers, individuals and small/medium sized businesses.
OutWit Hub is a Web data extraction software application designed to automatically extract information from online or local resources. It recognizes and grabs links, images, documents, contacts, recurring vocabulary and phrases, RSS feeds and converts structured and unstructured data into formatted tables which can be exported to spreadsheets or databases.
Website: https://www.outwit.com Price: $95 for single user license
WebHarvy is an easy to use, visual web scraping software, with a point and click interface. WebHarvy has powerful features under the hood so that most complex data extraction requirements can also be handled.
Website: https://www.webharvy.com Price: $129 for single user license
FMiner is an easy to use web data extraction tool that combines best-in-class features with an intuitive visual project design tool. With FMiner, users can quickly master data mining techniques to harvest data from a variety of websites ranging from online product catalogs and real estate classifieds sites to popular search engines and yellow page directories.
Website: http://www.fminer.com Price: Starting from $168
WebSundew is a complete web data extraction software and services package. This software lets you capture web data with high accuracy, productivity and speed.
Website: https://websundew.io Price: Starting from $99
Cloud - Web Based
Cloud services for web scraping lets you run the web mining operation in their servers. You can access these services using a web browser or a browser extension. The advantage is that the network and processing requirements for web scraping are handled by the cloud. Best suited for enterprise customers since cloud data scraping services offer high volume, high speed data extraction and features like data analysis and APIs. The cost of cloud scraping services are higher compared to desktop web scraping software.
Octoparse is a SaaS web data platform. You can use Octoparse to scrape web data and turn unstructured or semi-structured data from websites into a structured data set. It also provides ready to use web scraping templates including Amazon, eBay, Twitter, BestBuy, and many others. Octoparse also provides web data service that helps customize scrapers based on your scraping needs.
Website: https://www.octoparse.com Price: Starting from $75/Month, Free plan available
Import.io is an enterprise level data extraction, integration and automation platform. Import.io enables any organization to gain intelligence, efficiencies, and competitive advantages from the vast amount of data on the web.
Website: https://www.import.io Price: https://www.import.io/standard-plans/
Mozenda is another enterprise level data scraping platform. Mozenda's platform allows you to collect, structure, publish, analyze and visualize data from various sources.
Website: https://www.mozenda.com/ Price: Starting from $250/Month
Parsehub is a powerful web scraping platform which lets you collect data easily from various websites. Parsehub can be used to scrape data from interactive websites with an easy to use interface, without requiring users to write any code. Parsehub also provides an API to integrate extracted data. Data can also be imported from Google sheets and Tableau.
Website: https://www.parsehub.com/ Price: Starting from $149/Month, Free plan available
ProWebScraper lets you extract data from dynamic websites. Multiple levels of page navigation to scrape various categories within a website is supported. ProWebScraper supports extracting text, links, tables as well as high resolution images from websites. API support is available for developers to access the scraped data.
Website: https://prowebscraper.com/ Price: Starting from $40 for 5000 pages
Developers Tools & Libraries
If you are a developer, you can build your own data extraction solution. There are several libraries, tools and APIs which you can use to make development easier. The following are a few of them.
Beautiful Soup is a Python library which can be used for many projects including web scraping. Beautiful Soup lets you load and parse HTML to scrape data from web pages.
Website: https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/ Price: Free
APIfy lets you turn any website into an API. This lets you access the data displayed by pages within the website just like if the website provided an API. APIfy also supports web automation to automate manual workflows and processes on the web.
Website: https://apify.com/ Price: Starting from $49/month. Free plan available.
ScraperAPI is a proxy API for web scraping. Scraper API handles proxies, browsers and CAPTCHAs so that developers can concentrate on parsing the HTML to get the data which they need.
Website: https://www.scraperapi.com/ Price: Starting from $29/month
ScrapingBee also provides an API for handling headless browsers and proxies so that developers need not worry about these details while scraping data. Running multiple instances of headless browsers which is required while web scraping is a resource intensive operation, and remote websites can block these browsers while continuously accessing their pages to extract data. Both these problems are solved by ScrapingBee.
Website: https://www.scrapingbee.com/ Price: Starting from $29/month
Scrapy is an open source Python framework for extracting data from websites. Scrapy is maintained by Scrapinghub and other contributors. Scrapy scripts can be deployed on Scrapinghub's Scrapy Cloud.
Website: https://scrapy.org/ Price: Free
Scraperbox gets HTML from any webpage through a single API call, utilizing a genuine browser, all while avoiding blockages. Scraperbox seamlessly handles browser management and rotating proxies on your behalf.
Website: https://scraperbox.com/ Price: Starting from $19/month
If you wish to include your software, service or tool in this list, or make changes in details listed here please contact us.