12 Best Web Scraping Tools and Software

When it comes to extracting information from the internet and using it for specific purposes, web scraper tools come in very handy.

Essentially, they are software or bots that go through databases and retrieve information from them. This entails obtaining data and content from websites, extracting the underlying HTML code as well as the data stored.

This can then replicate the information anywhere. They can also be used to store data and extract it from APIs.

Many digital businesses use web scraper tools. Their applicability includes:

• Pulling data from social media platforms and forums to conduct sentiment analysis for market research
• Analyzing and ranking content via search engine bots
• Auto-retrieving prices and product descriptions for allied seller websites and used by price comparison websites.

Unfortunately, web scraping is also done for illegal reasons. These include:

• Undercutting prices
• Stealing copyrighted content

In this article, we will discuss the top 12 best web scraper tools and software that will help you best meet your needs.

1. Data Collector by Bright Data

Data Collector has set a new standard in terms of web scraping. A product by BrightData, this web scraper tool performs the job at scale with zero infrastructure. It has a patented, proxy network infrastructure of its own, and can tap into public websites that are usually difficult to access.

In Data Collector, you collect data by yourself since there is no code needed. You no longer need a team of data acquisition specialists who can manage proxies and engage in data extraction. This easy to use solution saves time, effort and resources.

In order to develop a web scraper, you need to take the following steps:

1. Choose from pre-made code templates or make your own from scratch.
2. Use Data Collector’s ready-made scraping functions to develop and customize your scraper.
3. Decide whether to get the data in real-time or batches.
4. Choose the file format and where to send the data.

Features

1. Ready-made functions and coding templates
2. 2200+ granted patent claims
3. Seamless data structuring
4. Automated flexibility
5. Enterprise-grade scaling
6. Compliance with industry best practices

Pricing

The Annual plan starts from $1000 per month, and the One-time Project plan starts from $1500. These packages include management of your data collection operations by a dedicated account manager, retrieval of data from targeted websites, full access to IDE for editing your collector’s code and personalized data structuring and enrichment.

2. Scraping Bee

Scraping Bee is a web scraping API that rotates proxies and handles headless browsers, enabling the extraction of required data. It treats your web page as if it were an actual browser.

Using the Chrome version, Scraping Bee extracts only the required data and eliminates the processing that takes place due to the simultaneous running of headless browsers. This allows you to maintain space in your RAM and CPU. Day to day marketing and engineering operations are simplified and it does away with the need to spend time sourcing the right proxy provider.

Moreover, Scraping Bee allows the rendering of JavaScript with a simple parameter to scrape all kinds of websites using a range of different libraries. Proxies are rotated, and the tool allows you to bypass rate-limiting websites, remain unblocked and hide your bots.

Features

1. General Web Scraping. It is used for tasks such as real estate scraping, price monitoring and the extraction of reviews.
2. Data Extraction. You can get the data you need with one simple API call and obtain formatted JSON data.
3. JavaScript scenario. Clicking, scrolling or running code on the website you want to scrape has never been easier.
4. The taking of both full-page and partial screenshots is enabled.
5. Search engine result page. Using the Google search API, you can bypass rate limits.
6. No code. The Make integration creates custom web scraping engines without incorporating any code.

Pricing

The freelance plan is for $49 per month. It has a 100,000 API credits, JavaScript rendering, rotating and premium proxies and geotargeting.

The startup plan is for $99 per month. It has 1 million API credits, more concurrent requests and priority email support.

The business plan is for $249 per month. It has 2.5 million credits, 40 concurrent requests and a dedicated account manager to handle effective team management.

The enterprise plan starts from $999 per month. It allows high-level customization for large teams.

3. Scrape.do

Scrape.do is considered to be one of the best rotating proxy and web scraping API.  It gathers data using powerful proxies from any location.

In order to retrieve data, the Scrape.do API sends parameters such as URL, Header, Body etc so that data access is enabled via proxies and pull raw data. All the request parameters sent to the API will reach the target website without changes.

In order to utilize this tool properly, you need to know the following:

1. The data center, residential and mobile APIs combine to form a large IP pool and are used against a target website with almost complete success, generating different IPs for every different request.
2. Exceeding the rate limit will result in an error code 429. This issue can be easily resolved by confirming that your request limit has the same conditions as your subscription plan.
3. A 401 error is given if you have an unpaid bill or your monthly request limit has exceeded.
4. By sending multiple parameters, you can access the features specified on other pages.
5. You will not be charged for status codes, except for the 200 or 404 codes.
6. There is a 2 MB response size limit for each request. Data retrieval will be considered successful even if you exceed the limit, and only 2 MB worth of data will be extracted.

Features

1. Rotating proxies. Some websites have tight restrictions. Scrape.do has data centers, mobile and residential proxies that can obtain data from anywhere.
2. You can target any country, be it the USA, UK, Australia or Canada. Scrape.do will do the work for you.
3. Backconnect proxy. With each access request, the API assigns you a different IP. There is hence no chance that you will get blocked.
4. Callback/Webhook. You no longer have to wait for website results. Scrape.do manages requests and pushes results at your end.
5. Javascript Execution. Advanced JS execution lets you click a button, open a pop-up or explore a targeted website.
6. Avoiding blocks and captcha. Scrape.do immediately detects if there is a blocking to your proxy location. It instantly assigns you and IP from a new location. This happens automatically.
7. Amazing support. Experts are available to guide you with these amazing proxies.
8. Unlimited bandwidth. You no longer have to worry about calculating your costs.

Pricing

The free package has 5 concurrent requests, and a total of 1000 requests per month with Business Plan features.

The Hobby plan is for $29/month. It has a 250,000 success API call, rotating proxies and unlimited bandwidth amongst other features.

The Pro plan is for $99/month. In addition to the Hobby plan features, it also includes JavaScript rendering and geotargeting.

The Business Plan is for $249/month and offers 3,500,000 success API calls and dedicated support.

4. Apify

Apify is considered to be one of the most powerful web scraping and automation platform. Whatever you do manually in a browser can be automated and run at scale.

Apify has a lot of functionality which includes the following:

1. Collecting data from any website. The ready-to-use scraping tools help you extract unlimited amounts of structured data to solve your unique use cases. Fast and accurate results are obtained.
2. Automating online processes. Speeding up workflows, bringing scale to processes and automating tedious tasks is possible with flexible software. As compared to your competitors, you can work smarter and faster.
3. Integrating with any system. Scraped data can be exported in machine-readable formats such as JSON or CSV. Apify provides seamless integration with your existing Zapier or Make workflows, or any other web apps using API and webhooks.
4. Never getting blocked. Apify bots ape humans to perfection. They do so by the smart rotation of data center and residential proxies, along with industry-leading browser fingerprinting technology.
5. Having a rich developer ecosystem. You don’t need to worry about vendor lock-in as Apify is built on solid open-source tools. There is also a thriving community of Apify freelancers and partners that you can benefit from.

Features

On a broad level, these include:

1. AI/Machine Learning
2. Batch processing
3. Data mapping. transformation and extraction
4. Document, IP and image extraction
5. Reporting and analytics
6. Workflow management
7. Data aggregation and publishing, import and export

Pricing

The free version has $5 worth of platform credits and a 30-day trial of shared proxies.

The personal plan is $49 per month and has more credits with email support.

The team plan is $499 per month and has chat support with an allowance for more than 9 team seats.

The enterprise plan is customized with unlimited options and premium support.

5. Scrapingdog

Scrapindog is a web scraping API that deals with proxies, browsers and CAPTCHAs to help you extract HTML data from web pages in a single API call. It can be used easily on different browsers and also provides a software for instant web scraping demands.

By using Scrapingdog, you will no longer get blocked. Millions of proxies are rotated and CAPTCHAs are dealt with efficiently so that your web scraping can continue uninterrupted. Rendering JavaScript permits you to increase the frequency of your data collection.

Webhooks allow you to push website URLs and receive crawled data. All queues and schedules are managed by the tool. You can call the asynchronous API and start getting scraped data.

Features

1. Headless Chrome. Using your browser in a headless mode will allow you to render any page just as if you were using a real browser. There will be no additional headers within the web scraping API.
2. Scalable web scrapers. Proxy scrapers bypass restrictions and allow you to obtain data from a host of social media websites.
3. Scraping of website content on demand. The APIs allow you to access internet data freely.

Pricing

The lite plan is for $20 per month. It allows basic functionality, but without residential proxies and JS rendering.

The standard plan is for $90 per month. It further allows you to scrape thousands of LinkedIn profiles.

The pro plan is for $200 per month. It has all features provided by the previous packages and allows a greater number of LinkedIn profiles to be scraped.

6. Scraper API

Scraper API is a data extraction tool for specific websites, databases or programs. It does away with the process of conducting manual research by providing valued and structured data. It works with proxies, browsers and CAPTCHAs to retrieve HTML from web pages.

This software ensures that you no longer have to deal with proxies and rotate many IP addresses in order to stay unblocked. You can easily scrape any website with JS rendering, geotargeting or residential proxies.

Anti bot detection and bypassing are built into Scraper API. It also guarantees unlimited bandwidth, automatically does away with slow Australian proxies and provides speeds up to 100 Mb/s for fast web crawling. Scraper API is also built for scale.

Features

1. Auto proxy rotation
2. Auto CAPTCHA handling
3. JS rendering
4. Geolocation targeting
5. Custom support
6. Web data extraction
7. Data aggregation and publishing

Pricing

The hobby plan is for $49 per month and offers a certain limited number of API credits, concurrent threads and US & GEO targeting.

The startup plan is for $149 per month. It allows you to work with more API credits and concurrent threads as compared to the hobby plan.

The business plan is for $299 per month. In addition to API credits and concurrent threads, it allows all geotargeting.

The professional plan offers more features above that offered by the business plan and is for $999 per month.

The enterprise plan is a custom priced plan. It provides all premium features and dedicated support.

7. AvesAPI

AvesAPI is considered to be the world’s fastest API for SEO tools, rank trackers and SERP checkers. It was created in order to aid developers and agencies with their projects by offering a large amount of structured data.

This easy and reachable data offers a variety of options to those embarking on new projects and do not want to spend a lot of time or money.

The AvesAPI scrapes SERP data at scale by SEO agencies, marketing professionals and companies all over the world. It has a smart distributed system that can easily scrape millions of keywords with ease.

Trying to obtain accurate SERP data from Google is an arduous task. You have some keywords and need to check SERP results regularly, and manually doing so is very time-consuming.

You will also have to go through CAPTCHA and other blocking mechanisms after a certain number of requests. This SERP scraper will therefore allow you to constantly check your keyword SERP data without managing proxies captchas. Aves SERP API always provides you with fresh data and lets you go beyond limits.

Features 

1. User management
2. Google Analytics Integration
3. Auditing
4. Rank Tracking
5. Content Management
6. Dashboard
7. Keyword Tracking
8. Competitor Analysis
9. Geo-targeted search
10. Highly scalable

Pricing

AvesAPI has a pay-per-usage pricing model that only bills you for the success service.

The free plan lets you perform about 1000 searches that are geo targeted to produce live results.

The starter plan is for $50 has all the free plan features but allows 25,000 searches.

The premium plan is for $125 and allows about a 100,000 live searches.

8. ParseHub

ParseHub is a free and powerful web scraping tool. The advanced web scraper allows data extraction simply by clicking on the required data set.

Working with ParseHub is very simple. It entails that you download the desktop app and choose a site to scrape data from. You then click to select data from multiple pages-you can interact with AJAX, forms, drop-downs etc. Finally, you can download results by accessing data via JSON, Excel and API in the form of data on dedicated servers.

ParseHub scrapes any interactive website. You can collect and store data from any JavaScript and AJAX page. No coding is required in order to retrieve data. The machine learning relationship engine does all the work for you. Most importantly, ParseHub is incredibly powerful and flexible. You can get data from millions of web pages by entering thousands of keywords and links.

Features

1. Clouds based automatic collection and storage of data
2. IP Rotation for when you go through a website
3. Scheduled Collection by getting a new set of data at different points in time
4. Regular Expressions in the form of cleaning text & HTML before downloading data
5. API & Web-hooks integrate your extracted data anywhere
6. JSON & Excel functionality for downloading your scraped data in any format for analysis

Pricing

The free plan allows you to access 200 pages of data in 40 minutes, provides limited support and allows data retention for 14 days.

The Standard plan is for $189 per month and allows data retrieval at a faster pace. It also allows you to save images and files to Dropbox.

The Professional plan is for $599 per month. It allows unlimited pages per run and 120 private projects.

The ParseHub Plus is an Enterprise Web Scraping package. Experts scrape and develop your data, and a dedicated account manager provides premium service with priority support.

9. Diffbot

Diffbot is a tool that retrieves data from the web without web scraping. Instead of querying a great number of pieces of connected content from the web, you can extract them on demand using Diffbot.

The internet can be overwhelming with the amount of data that is available online, in the code of 1.2 billion public websites. Diffbot mimics human activity and transforms code into usable data.

Essentially, Diffbot turns unstructured data from the web to structured, contextual databases. It incorporates cutting-edge machine vision and natural language processing software that can go through a vast number of documents on a regular basis.

Features

The following products each enable functionality as per their respective features:

1. Knowledge Graph: Search. It finds and builds accurate data feeds of companies, news and people
2. Knowledge Graph: Enhance. You can add on and build up your existing data sets of people and accounts
3. Natural Language. Diffbot infers and formulates relationships and conducts sentiment analysis based on raw text
4. This is made possible by analyses of articles, products and discussions without any rules
5. Any site can be converted into a structured database in a few minutes

Pricing

The Startup plan is for $299 per month. It is for small teams looking for easy plug-and-play solutions for data extraction purposes.

The Plus plan is for $899 per month and also tacks on access to Crawl for scraping entire websites and providing greater usage limits.

The Enterprise plan is customized. It offers tailored plans and managed solutions, along with premium support

10. Octoparse

Octoparse is a modern visual web data extraction software. All kinds of users can easily use it to extract information from bulk software. Notably, no coding is required for scraping tasks.

This easy to use software can be run on a number of operating systems. Data extraction from both static and dynamic websites is possible, including web pages using Ajax.

Different types of data formats can be used for extraction- CSV, EXCEL, HTML, TXT and different databases. Octoparse is trained to operate as a human when conducting scraping activities.

Features

1. A visual operation pane allows you to manage data extraction.
2. Cloud extraction. Large-scale scraping takes place at the same time, based on distributed computing using many cloud servers.
3. Your systems can be connected to a lot of data in real time.
4. Octoparse enables scraping by rotating anonymous HTTP proxy servers.
5. Data extraction. This includes price monitoring, lead generation, marketing and research

Pricing

The free plan is used for small and simple projects, and has limited functionality.

The standard plan is for $89 per month and is great for small teams.  It allows more tasks to be completed and allows downloading of images and files.

The professional plan is for $249 per month. It is ideal for medium-sized businesses, includes advanced APIs and also allows auto backup of data to cloud.

The enterprise plan is for businesses with high-capacity requirements. It also allows processing that can be scaled and done simultaneously. There is multirole access, customized onboarding, priority support and a high level of automation and integration.

11. Grepsr

Grepsr is a web scraping tool that automates your routine data extractions and scales your operations with quality-assured data sets. The software has allowed businesses to turn widely available, scattered and unstructured data into actionable insights for channeling into strategy.

Quality is assured for brands, and Grepsr has a proven track record for providing it. A large number of industry leaders widely use the tool’s expertise.

Getting started with Grepsr involves a series of simple steps. First of all, there is the initial project consultation. Data specifics and KPIs are decided upon to ensure that project aims will be achieved. Automated data extraction specific to your use case will be set up and you will be provided with a sample data set.

Data collection will then commence, with scaling and the full run taking place so as to provide results according to deadlines. The team ensures that all subsequent runs are being handled successfully, and that data is obtained with the least disruption.

Features

1. Data infrastructure. Grepsr is designed for high-volume web data and handles millions of pages every hour.
2. Quality at scale. People, processes and technology are harnessed to ensure high quality in every data set.
3. Team collaboration. This is designed to ensure the seamless flow of information.
4. Integration and automation. An intelligent platform is provided that sets up custom schedules and automates routine extractions to run efficiently.

Pricing

Grepsr offers simple and effective pricing for any use cases. Custom data solutions are priced to match unique data needs and scale.

12. Scrapy

Scrapy is an open-source and collaborative framework for extracting the data needed from websites. It is fast, simple and extensible, and is maintained by Zyte and many other contributors.

This software extracts data once you write down all the rules. It is extensible by design and allows plug in functionality without touching the core. Moreover, it is portable, written in Python and runs on a number of various operating systems.

Features

12. Open-source software
13. Free web crawling framework
14. Integration
15. Developer API
16. Collaborative tools
17. Site audit
18. Keyword research
19. Keyword suggestion tool
20. Data import/export
21. Generation of feed exports in formats such as JSON, CSV and XML
22. Built in support for selecting and extracting data from sources by either using XPath or CSS expressions
23. Automatic extraction of data from web pages

Pricing

Scrapy starts off from a free version and offers customized pricing plans to users based on their requirements.

These 12 web scraping and software tools are the solution to your data retrieval needs and aim to help you make meaningful insights for business and decision-making.