Are you starting an e-commerce business, would you like to know the pricing offered by competitors? Do you want to conduct a market analysis that is highly accurate and insightful?
The above and many other burning queries can be legitimately solved by Web Scraping Tools. In simple words, if you have “copy and pasted” data on your website, that pretty much sums web scraping, only what you are doing is at a minuscule level and it is done manually.
Web scraping tools are extremely essential for any business that relies on data from the web. With these tools, you can easily and quickly gather data from websites, social media, and other online sources. This data can then be used to improve your products or services, understand your customers better, or simply make better decisions.
By scraping data from popular websites through open-source web scraping tools, you can quickly see what people are talking about and how this might impact your business. In short, web scraping tools are essential for any business that wants to stay ahead of the competition and make the most of the data available online.
How can web data extraction tools help?
1. Retail & Manufacturing
- New or existing eCommerce businesses can keep track of their competitor’s pricing strategies. Web scraping automates the process of retrieving the prices of your competitor and updates you periodically within an instant
- Manufacturers can monitor MAP compliance
- It finds you product images and descriptions with lighting speed.
- You can review all customer feedback from different websites in one spreadsheet with the help of web scraping.
2. Equity and Financial Research
- Web scraping tools can scan and pull out valuable insights, news information and transform them into understandable investment data.
- Analysts can use web scraping to get financial statements and from thousands of websites and through different timelines, which manually is impossible.
3. Data Science
- Web data extraction makes Real-time analytics accessible so that it is analyzed instantly.
- To determine patterns and foretell future trends, one needs to analyze information from existing data, this is called predictive analysis. The capabilities of web scraping are of great importance to predictive analysis.
- Machine Learning Training Models.
- Natural Language Processing.
4. Marketing & Sales
- Data is the lifeline of marketing and sales activities and web scraping helps in producing data-driven strategies.
- Web scraping assists in developing unique and engaging content that is vital to the increase the web traffic and thus helping business grow.
- No more spending hefty amounts on generating leads.
- You can change your SEO, content marketing and thrive in the competitive internet era.
Other Industries using web scraping tools are
- Web scraping is an integral part of new scraping due to the proficient information extraction from numerous sources
- Teaching, research work, etc are under the head of academics, and it revolves around quantity and quality information.
- Using Infographics, graphs, and charts support Data journalism. Journalists can use web scraping to create impressive content.
Today, data is the number one most essential resource today.No matter which industry you are in, by deploying the web scraping creatively you will always be a step ahead of your competitors.
Now you might wonder, how do I go about web scarping? To begin with, there are tools, and these web harvesting tools or web data extraction tools are useful to anyone seeking information from the World Wide Web.
9 Best Web Scraping Tools
There are many great web scraping tools out there these days. It is important to find the right tool for your needs as each one has its own strengths and weaknesses. So make sure you choose a tool that will fit your needs!
1. Import.io
Launched in 2012, Import.io is a simplistic web data extracting tool helping small-medium sized businesses to large enterprises. The UI is simple, you can begin by entering the URL, and next, it processes and identifies data from the web page and transforms into a structured format. Deployed by all industrial sectors including Travel & hospitality, retail and manufacturing, equity and financial research, risk management, product, marketing, and sales, etc.
Highlights
- The easy to use user interface.
- Ideal for price monitoring and generating quality leads.
- Scans and extracts data from 1000 sites for quality market and academic research
- Advanced extraction: XPath, CSS Selectors, RegEx, JS
- Makes mobile app development easier, by deploying artificial intelligence to extract data as per the user’s preference.
- World-class performance delivered
Pricing
There are two plans
- Community- Free of cost. Create a free account and get started
- Enterprise- For the pricing, you have to schedule a consultation
2. Octoparse
A modern visual web data harvesting software that can be easily used by both experienced and inexperienced users. Octoparse is ideal for bulk information extraction from websites, and most importantly without any complex coding.
Octoparse offers two modes, one is Wizard for the step-wise process to extract data, and the other is called Advanced mode, a feature for complex web pages.
Highlights
- The cloud platform allows for 6 to 20 times quicker data extraction, running the extraction task 24/7
- Be it any complex site Javascript, AJAX, within in moment whole data is at your disposal including text, links, URL, and HTML code.
- Access the data via API, CSV, Excel, and get it automatically delivered to your systems.
- With automatic IP rotation, you can minimize the risk of being traced or blocked.
Pricing
Good news is that Octoparse has a SALE on all plans from June 17th, 2020 ~ Jun 24th, 2020
3. Webscraper.io
With webscraper.io the user can create a sitemap on how to inspect the website and extract data from it.
The website offers two products, one is the Web Scraper browser extension is easily available for google chrome and the other is the Web Scraper Cloud.
Highlights
- Web scraping made simpler with point and click interface.
- Navigate a website at all levels and extract data.
- Compatible with all modern framework websites such as Javascript.
- Scrape information and export it in CSV format directly.
- With the Web Scraper Cloud, export data CSV, XLSX, and JSON formats and obtain it via API, webhooks or get it exported via Dropbox.
Pricing
The browser extension is available for free. Other plans come with a free trial period.
4. Parsers.me
Extract structured data from sites without using any codes by installing the Parse browser extension. After the process is complete you can see the analyzed data on the charts and download the structured data in the required format (Excel, XML, CSV) or get by API.
Highlights
- Uses machine learning analysis and finds data pages based on the entered template.
- An exceptional tool for analytics.
- No limits per month, no limit on the number of days, no limit on the number of sites, no credit card needed.
- You can access and open values that are not visible on the page.
Pricing
It comes with a 100% No-Risk Money Back Guarantee!
The users are protected by 100% No-Risk Double-Guarantee. If at any point you don’t like Parsers over the next 30 days, then they will refund 100% of your money. Hassle-free process.
5. Scraping Bot
Scraping Bot APIs enables you to accumulate accurate data instantly and reliably so that users can get on with aspects of their business.
Highlights
- JavaScript rendering (Headless Chrome)
- Superior quality proxies
- Full Page HTML
- Geotargeting
- Automate data collection on a large scale
Pricing
Start today with free AI calls, no credit card details are required.
6. ScraperAPI
Founded by Daniel Ni in 2018, ScraperAPI is an excellent proxy API for web scraping. It is aimed to manage proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs so that you can get the HTML from any kind of web page with just an API call. All you need to do is send your chosen URL to ScraperAPI for scraping. In return, you will receive an HTML response from the tool. The whole process is so fast, reliable, and hassle-free that it lets you focus more on data than the proxies.
Highlights
- Scrapes any web page with JS rendering, geotargeting or residential proxies
- Includes 40M IPS globally
- More than 50 geolocations are included
- Offers 99.9% uptime guarantee
- Has unlimited bandwidth with speeds up to 100Mb/s
- Easy to use and completely customizable
- Provides 24/7 customer support
Pricing
Other than the regular plans, there is also a Custom Enterprise plan. Contact the sales team to know about the pricing. You can also try its 7-day free trial before buying any plan.
7. Bright Data
Founded by Ofer Vilenski and Derry Shribman, Bright Data is another great web scraping tool, allowing you to retrieve web data as per your need. It offers unlimited scale and customization possibilities. The high quality data and fast output can never fail to impress you.
Highlights
- Has a transparent, trust-worth and enterprise-friendly infrastructure
- Offers efficient service
- There are 4 types of proxy services available – residential proxies, datacenter proxies, ISP proxies and mobile proxies
- Delivers structured web data, compatible with any tool
Pricing
Bright Data offers multiple plans. City-level targeting and dedicated IP addresses are also available at an additional cost.
8. Apify
Do you want to turn your website into an API? Choose Apify and use its web scraping tools to do this easily. Apify has more than five hundred ready-to-use and flexible web scraping tools to help you. Find the right tool for your web scraping or automation project and get started in just a few clicks.
Highlights
- Makes web scraping, data extraction and automation fast and easy
- Includes hundreds of ready-to-use tools
- Can collect data from any website
- Built on solid open source tools
Pricing
You can try its free version. The free plan has limitations. For better assistance, try its Personal, Team, and enterprise plans.
9. Oxylabs
Oxylabs offers efficient web scraping solutions for collecting public web data on a large scale. Its scraper APIs include SERP Scraper API, E-commerce Scraper API, and Web Scraper API. Its proxy services are also innovative and efficient.
Highlights
- Trustworthy proxy resources
- World-class proxies and an expert team help you excel in your scraping job
- Continuously work on growing the existing proxy pool to match every customer’s requirements
- 24/7 live support
Pricing
You can bill monthly or yearly for the plans. You can also try its 1-week free trial version.
Conclusion
Data, is all you need, whether you are a budding entrepreneur or a well-established business. You have to be in sync with trends to stay authentic and functional in this competitive era.
Web Scraping makes the best use of the global repository that the open web is and the web scraping tools are here to make your work easier.
We hope the above-compiled list of web scraping tools is helpful to your project and websites. Please feel free to share your thoughts and we also welcome suggestions.