You’re bored of fetching data manually from different sources or you don’t have enough funds to hire someone for your day to day task to download data from different sources? Well, I think it’s high time that you start writing down some code for web scraping! As it is very easy and economical also to use web scraping tools instead of hiring someone, it can save a lot of time of yours. I have listed down best 17 web scraping tools for you to start with.

  1. Diggernaut


    Diggernaut is composed of complex nested datasets that can be exported as JSON, XLS, XLSX, JSON, XML, CSV, TXT, any text-based format using a template. It can read data from JSON, XML, HTML, iCAL, JS, XLS, XLSX, CSV, Google Spreadsheets. Diggernaut can bypass CAPTCHA protection and provides micro-services like API, Geocoding, OCR, data-on-demand, LibPostal. It provides a free library of scrapers for websites like Amazon, eBay, etc. Diggernaut extracts product prices, news, headlines, various events occurring across the globe, different government data and reports, licenses, permits, comments on forums or social media sites, real estate details, etc. For non-programmers, it provides a Visual Extractor Tool to build configurations.

     

  2. ScrapingBot

    Scraping-bot.io is an efficient tool when the user wants to extract data from the URL. It provides the facility to test without coding. ScrapingBot has high-quality proxies and can fulfil up to 20 concurrent requests. It uses JS rendering and converts the entire HTML page into data content. It allows a large bulk of scraping and supports Geotargeting. Scrapingbot allows easy integration of API which increases data collection efficiency.

  1. Scrape.works

    It has pre-configured bots to help the users automate routine scrapes from reputed websites like Amazon, Yelp and more. This cloud-based web scraping tool is made exclusively for non-coders. Scrapeworks allows the user to schedule their scrape to the required frequency. If the user is interested in scraping for some fixed days in the week then the user can schedule the scraping daily, weekly, or monthly. This tool provides automatic IP rotation which allows large-scale dynamic data extraction with encrypted policies easily. Scrapeworks integrates accurate data in a system with flexible API in both batch and real-time processing. It assures the quality of data with high accuracy.

  1. ScrapingBee

    This API rotates proxies and handles web browser without a graphical user interface. These types of browsers are called headless browsers. Scrapingbee uses JS rendering with simple parameters for scraping the websites. It has a large proxy pool and provides high quality rotating proxies. Scrapingbee has ready-made API’s for E-Commerce sites, Google, Instagram, etc. This API has Geolocated residential proxies and a high-level of concurrency.

  1. OctoParse

    This easy to configure scraping tool consists of a point and click user interface that allows the user to educate the scraper on how to steer and obtain files from the website. Octoparse allows the user to extract data from Ad-heavy pages by providing the feature of Ad blocking. It allows the user to run extraction on the cloud as well as the local machine. It executes concurrent extractions with faster scraping speed 24/7. Octoparse also provides the feature of schedule scraping and automatic IP rotation.

  1. Scraper API

    This API helps the user in managing proxies, browsers and CAPTCHAs. With a simple API call, users can get HTML of any web page. Users only need to send a GET request to API end-point with their API key and URL. This process makes scraper API easy to integrate. Like most scraping tools Scraper API also uses JS rendering. Users are provided with the facility to customize the headers for each request and for the request type. Scraper API offers unprecedented speed and extreme reliability allowing the users to build extensible web scrapers. This tool provides geolocated rotation proxies and allows unlimited bandwidth that is only successful requests will be charged.

  1. Import.io

    Import.io is a web scraping tool that helps the user to form datasets by importing data from any web page and exporting data to CSV. This tool integrates data into an application using APIs and webhooks. It has easy interaction with web forms and logins. Import.io allows scheduled extraction of data – daily, weekly or monthly depending upon user needs. Users can store and access data by using Import.io cloud. This web scraping tool allows the user to gain insights by using charts, graphs, and various other visualizations. It automates web interactions and workflows.   

  1. Dexi.io

    This powerful web scraping tool allows immediate conversion of unlimited web data to business values. Dexi.io enables the user to save the cost and the time for the organization. It has increased efficiency, quality and accuracy. This tool has the ultimate extensible speed for data intelligence. It allows efficient and rapid data extraction which benefits the user in both time and cost. Dexi.io has a high magnitude of knowledge capture. It quickly spots opportunities, authenticates user propositions against any available competitions and cross-checks against thousands of data points. It interacts with both web and cloud sources, identifying and closing data gaps to deliver complete and powerful automation and insights.

  1. Webhose.io

    Webhose.io allows the user to access historical feeds covering over ten years worth of data from across the globe and gain a detailed understanding of the market. It provides direct access to structural and real-time data crawling across thousands of web sites. It offers the user structured and machine-readable datasets in JSON and XML formats. The main feature of this tool is that it helps the user to access a massive repository of data feeds without extra cost.

    An advanced filter permits the user to conduct a granular analysis of datasets that the user wants to feed. Webhose.io is used by various organizations for financial analysis, market learning, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, media and web monitoring. This tool provides archive data that offers the users a huge data repository of sources comprised of blogs, news, reviews, online discussions and forums.

  1. ScrapingHub

    This is a flexible cloud-based data extraction tool that helps in fetching valuable data for companies. This tool allows the users to store data in a high-ability database. This tool converts the entire web page into organized data content and supports bypassing bot counter-measures to crawl large or bot-protected sites. It is open-source with more than forty plus open source projects.

    It provides the most advanced cloud platform in order to manage web crawlers. Scrapinghub offers both data services and developer tools for users. Data Services are ideal for companies of any size which need reliable and accurate datasets whereas Developer Tools are ideal for developers, data scientists or for data teams that give the impression of executing web scrapping projects.

  2. Selenium

    Selenium is not exactly a web scraper. This is more an automated testing tool used by web developers to test their web applications. But you can use selenium to extract data from a web page. This tool is completely open-source and it supports many languages like JavaScript, PHP, Python etc. This tool is being used by many companies like Netflix, Google, HubSpot, Fitbit etc. Selenium uses Chromium to run automated tests. It comes in two parts, which are the Selenium IDE and Selenium Grid. As the name suggests Selenium IDE is the Integrated Development Environment, this package includes all the dependencies required to run automates tests. It comes with web driver which is used as a communication medium between the code and the browser. While Selenium Grid allows you to run parallel tests on parallel machines on different browsers at the same time. The grid can run more than 100 tests parallelly. The main goal of the grid is to save time and money.

    Selenium can be integrated with workflows like Agile and DevOps. It can also be integrated with development platforms like Jenkins, Mavens, SauceLabs. Back in 2017, the development of Selenium and its support was stopped. At that time Firefox 55 broke the news of Selenium. After that Applitools approached Selenium developer community for support and made Selenium available under Apache 2.0 license.

    Selenium has cross-browser support which means it can be executed on Chrome as well as Firefox and is available as Google Chrome extension.

  3. Puppeteer

    This is another automation tool like Selenium, which is not a web scraping tool but can be used for web scrapping. Puppeteer is an automation tool or you can say Node.js package developed by Google. You can use this tool for web automation as well as scraping. Personally I like Puppeteer more than Selenium as it provides more features than Selenium.

    By default, Puppeteer runs in the headless mode which means all the operations can be done with Chrome running in the background. The benefit of using Chrome in headless mode is that it consumes fewer resources and provides stable automation since no one will be interacting with the browser.

    Also, Selenium has too many dependencies, but Puppeteer has only the dependency of Node.js only. Since it is backed by the Chrome dev team, that means you can use almost every feature of Chromium listed on their dev tools API page.

    Puppeteer is much faster than Selenium as it has less dependency as well as it doesn’t require any specific IDE. But there are cons as well, for example, like Puppeteer is not cross-browser which means you cannot use it on Firefox. Although there are unofficial packages available for running Puppeteer with TOR as well as Firefox browser. Puppeteer also does not support any language other than Node.js while Selenium supports C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby and PHP.

    One more thing which found unique about Selenium is that you can use it multiple platforms like Android, iOS, Windows, Blackberry apps as well.

    Installation Command: npm i puppeteer

  4. Beautiful Soup 

    This is a python library for specifically web scraping. HTML and XML files. Beautiful soup. The package uses attributes and tags to scrape data from web pages. This library works bests with pandas. The library is completely open-source which means you can change the source code as per your requirements.

    Command to install: apt-get install python3-bs4

  5. Scrapy

    This is another Python library for building scalable web scrapers. The library is a full-fledged web crawling framework that can handle queuing requests, proxy middleware etc.

    Scrapy is completely opensource and free. The library has got more than 31,000 stars on GitLab which can easily determine that it is one of the most popular Python libraries for web scraping. The library is based on mini web spiders. These spiders crawl web pages and can also do automated testing. The library can also process the data from web pages which means the scrapped data can be formatted as well as stored to another server. This feature makes Scrapy different from other web scraping libraries.

    Installation Command:  pip install scrapy

  6. Cheerio

    This is another package for Node.js and is one of the most flexible packages available for web scraping on node.js. the library uses core functionality of jQuery and works on DOM. The Cheerio doesn’t use the browser instead provides a set of APIs to work on web pages.

    Cheerio is being used by many big companies like Airbnb, ScrappingBee etc. Like other web scrapers, cheerio also works on selectors to scrap data from web pages. The package also provides you to manipulate web pages. This package can be easily used with Puppeteer as it is very easy to use and also makes Cheerio scrape web pages which require some automation.

    Installation Command: npm install cheerio

  7. Kimurai

    This framework is for Ruby. Kimurai uses headless Chrome/Firefox, PhantomJS and normal GET requests to scrap data. The library is very similar to Scrapy and allows Ruby to interact with JavaScript rendered websites. Kimurai also allows you to set custom headers, cookies, the delay between requests and modify user-agents. It also allows you to scrap pages parallelly.

    Installation Command: gem install kimurai