Monday, January 18, 2021
Web scraping (also termed web data extraction, screen scraping, or web harvesting) is a technique of extracting data from the websites. It turns unstructured data into structured data that can be stored into your local computer or a database.
It can be difficult to build a web scraper for people who don’t know anything about coding. Luckily, there are tools available for people with or without programming skills. Also, if you're seeking a job for big data developers, using web scraper definitely raises your working effectiveness in data collection, improving your competitiveness. Here is our list of 30 most popular web scraping tools, ranging from open-source libraries to browser extension to desktop software.
Table of Content
1. Beautiful Soup
Who is this for: developers who are proficient at programming to build a web scraper/web crawler to crawl the websites.
Why you should use it: Beautiful Soup is an open-source Python library designed for web-scraping HTML and XML files. It is the top Python parsers that have been widely used. If you have programming skills, it works best when you combine this library with Python.
Some titles associated with Web Scraping include Data Scientist, Web Developer, Web Collection Specialist, Research Assistant, Application Developer, Web Mining Developer, Site Merchandiser, Market Intelligence Analyst, and of course, Web Scraper. In the U.S., Web Scraping can earn learners an average of $79,018 per year, according to ZipRecruiter. Sep 14, 2020 Using jsoup for web scraping. Jsoup is a popular Java-based HTML parser for manipulating and scraping data from web pages. The library is designed to work with real-world HTML, while implementing the best of HTML5 DOM (Document Object Model) methods and CSS selectors. Our web scraping technology eliminates the need to write scripts or hire developers. Harvesting data is 5x faster with Mozenda. Scrape text, files, images and PDF content from web pages with our point and click feature. Organize data files for publishing. Export directly.
2. Octoparse
Who is this for: People without coding skills in many industries, including e-commerce, investment, cryptocurrency, marketing, real estate, etc. Enterprise with web scraping needs.
Why you should use it: Octoparse is free for life SaaS web data platform. You can use to scrape web data and turns 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.
3. Import.io
Who is this for: Enterprise looking for integration solution on web data.
Why you should use it: Import.io is a SaaS web data platform. It provides a web scraping solution that allows you to scrape data from websites and organize them into data sets. They can integrate the web data into analytic tools for sales and marketing to gain insight from.
4. Mozenda
Who is this for: Enterprise and business with scalable data needs.
Why you should use it: Mozenda provides a data extraction tool that makes it easy to capture content from the web. They also provide data visualization services. It eliminates the need to hire a data analyst.
5. Parsehub
Who is this for: Data analyst, Marketers, and researchers who lack programming skills.
Why you should use it: ParseHub is a visual web scraping tool to get data from the web. You can extract the data by clicking any fields on the website. It also has an IP rotation function that helps change your IP address when you encounter aggressive websites with anti-scraping techniques.
6. Crawlmonster
Who is this for: SEO and marketers
Why you should use it: CrawlMonster is a free web scraping tool. It enables you to scan websites and analyze your website content, source code, page status, etc.
7. ProWebScraper
Who is this for: Enterprise looking for integration solution on web data.
Why you should use it: Connotate has been working together with Import.io, which provides a solution for automating web data scraping. It provides web data service that helps you to scrape, collect and handle the data.
8. Common Crawl
Who is this for: Researchers, students, and professors.
Why you should use it: Common Crawl is founded by the idea of open source in the digital age. It provides open datasets of crawled websites. It contains raw web page data, extracted metadata, and text extractions.
9. Crawly
Who is this for: People with basic data requirements.
Why you should use it: Crawly provides automatic web scraping service that scrapes a website and turns unstructured data into structured formats like JSON and CSV. They can extract limited elements within seconds, which include Title Text, HTML, Comments, DateEntity Tags, Author, Image URLs, Videos, Publisher and country.
10. Content Grabber
Who is this for: Python developers who are proficient at programming.
Why you should use it: Content Grabber is a web scraping tool targeted at enterprises. You can create your own web scraping agents with its integrated 3rd party tools. It is very flexible in dealing with complex websites and data extraction.
11. Diffbot
Who is this for: Developers and business.
Why you should use it: Diffbot is a web scraping tool that uses machine learning and algorithms and public APIs for extracting data from web pages. You can use Diffbot to do competitor analysis, price monitoring, analyze consumer behaviors and many more.
12. Dexi.io
Who is this for: People with programming and scraping skills.
Why you should use it: Dexi.io is a browser-based web crawler. It provides three types of robots — Extractor, Crawler, and Pipes. PIPES has a Master robot feature where 1 robot can control multiple tasks. It supports many 3rd party services (captcha solvers, cloud storage, etc) which you can easily integrate into your robots.
13. DataScraping.co
Who is this for: Data analysts, Marketers, and researchers who're lack of programming skills.
Why you should use it: Data Scraping Studio is a free web scraping tool to harvest data from web pages, HTML, XML, and pdf. The desktop client is currently available for Windows only.
14. Easy Web Extract
Who is this for: Businesses with limited data needs, marketers, and researchers who lack programming skills.
Why you should use it: Easy Web Extract is a visual web scraping tool for business purposes. It can extract the content (text, URL, image, files) from web pages and transform results into multiple formats.
15. FMiner
Who is this for: Data analyst, Marketers, and researchers who're lack of programming skills.
Why you should use it: FMiner is a web scraping software with a visual diagram designer, and it allows you to build a project with a macro recorder without coding. The advanced feature allows you to scrape from dynamic websites use Ajax and Javascript.
16. Scrapy
Who is this for: Python developers with programming and scraping skills
Why you should use it: Scrapy can be used to build a web scraper. What is great about this product is that it has an asynchronous networking library which allows you to move on to the next task before it finishes.
17. Helium Scraper
Who is this for: Data analysts, Marketers, and researchers who lack programming skills.
Why you should use it: Helium Scraper is a visual web data scraping tool that works pretty well especially on small elements on the website. It has a user-friendly point-and-click interface which makes it easier to use.
18. Scrape.it
Who is this for: People who need scalable data without coding.
Why you should use it: It allows scraped data to be stored on the local drive that you authorize. You can build a scraper using their Web Scraping Language (WSL), which is easy to learn and requires no coding. It is a good choice and worth a try if you are looking for a security-wise web scraping tool.
19. ScraperWiki
Who is this for: A Python and R data analysis environment. Ideal for economists, statisticians and data managers who are new to coding.
Why you should use it: ScraperWiki consists of 2 parts. One is QuickCode which is designed for economists, statisticians and data managers with knowledge of Python and R language. The second part is The Sensible Code Company which provides web data service to turn messy information into structured data.
20. Scrapinghub
Who is this for: Python/web scraping developers
Why you should use it: Scraping hub is a cloud-based web platform. It has four different types of tools — Scrapy Cloud, Portia, Crawlera, and Splash. It is great that Scrapinghub offers a collection of IP addresses covering more than 50 countries. This is a solution for IP banning problems.
21. Screen-Scraper
Who is this for: For businesses related to the auto, medical, financial and e-commerce industry.
Why you should use it: Screen Scraper is more convenient and basic compared to other web scraping tools like Octoparse. It has a steep learning curve for people without web scraping experience.
22. Salestools.io
Who is this for: Marketers and sales.
Why you should use it: Salestools.io is a web scraping tool that helps salespeople to gather data from professional network sites like LinkedIn, Angellist, Viadeo.
23. ScrapeHero
Who is this for: Investors, Hedge Funds, Market Analysts
Why you should use it: As an API provider, ScrapeHero enables you to turn websites into data. It provides customized web data services for businesses and enterprises.
24. UniPath
Who is this for: Bussiness in all sizes.
Why you should use it: UiPath is a robotic process automation software for free web scraping. It allows users to create, deploy and administer automation in business processes. It is a great option for business users since it helps you create rules for data management.
25. Web Content Extractor
Who is this for: Data analysts, Marketers, and researchers who're lack of programming skills.
Why you should use it:Web Content Extractor is an easy-to-use web scraping tool for individuals and enterprises. You can go to their website and try its 14-day free trial.
26. WebHarvy
Who is this for: Data analysts, Marketers, and researchers who lack programming skills.
Why you should use it: WebHarvy is a point-and-click web scraping tool. It’s designed for non-programmers. They provide helpful web scraping tutorials for beginners. However, the extractor doesn’t allow you to schedule your scraping projects.
27. Web Scraper.io
Who is this for: Data analysts, Marketers, and researchers who lack programming skills.
Why you should use it: Web Scraper is a chrome browser extension built for scraping data from websites. It’s a free web scraping tool for scraping dynamic web pages.
28. Web Sundew
Who is this for: Enterprises, marketers, and researchers.
Web Scraping Tool
Why you should use it: WebSundew is a visual scraping tool that works for structured web data scraping. The Enterprise edition allows you to run the scraping projects at a remote server and publish collected data through FTP.
29. Winautomation
Who is this for: Developers, business operation leaders, IT professionals
Why you should use it: Winautomation is a Windows web scraping tool that enables you to automate desktop and web-based tasks.
Online Web Scraping Tool
30. Web Robots
Who is this for: Data analysts, Marketers, and researchers who lack programming skills.
Free Online Jigsaw Puzzles
Why you should use it: Web Robots is a cloud-based web scraping platform for scraping dynamic Javascript-heavy websites. It has a web browser extension as well as desktop software, making it easy to scrape data from the websites.
Closing Thoughts
To extract data from websites with web scraping tools is a time-saving method, especially for those who don't have sufficient coding knowledge. There are many factors you should consider when choosing a proper tool to facilitate your web scraping, such as ease of use, API integration, cloud-based extraction, large-scale scraping, scheduling projects, etc. Web scraping software like Octoparse not only provides all the features I just mentioned but also provides data service for teams in all sizes - from start-ups to large enterprises. You can contact usfor more information on web scraping.
Ashley is a data enthusiast and passionate blogger with hands-on experience in web scraping. She focuses on capturing web data and analyzing in a way that empowers companies and businesses with actionable insights. Read her blog here to discover practical tips and applications on web data extraction 日本語記事：スクレイピングツール30選｜初心者でもWebデータを抽出できる |