Web scraping is the act of getting data/information from the web. It could be done manually or using some automation. As a big data developer, web scraping is a vital skill to wield, especially in situations where you are dealing with novel problems. In this tutorial, you will learn the best web scraping tool you can learn in 2021. Before we get on it fully, let’s understand what a web scraping tool is.
What is a Web Scraping Tool
Web scraping tools are tools that are used to aid a seamless data collection process from the web. Web scraping tools especially shines when you are scrapping big data. They are also called web data extraction tools, web scrappers, or web harvesting tools. These web scrapers make use of an artificially intelligent automated pipeline to take out data from websites, web applications, or mobile applications.
With web scraping tools, you can get data from websites in CSV, XLSX, or XML format. Now, let’s see some of the best tools out there.
- Scraper API
Scraper API is one of the best APIs for web scraping. The tool helps you handle proxy issues and CAPTCHAs so that you can get through to any HTML web page with just one API call. Scraper API changes your IP address for each request, as it has many proxies over multiple ISPs. With this, you can be sure to not get blocked by the server. It also retries failed requests automatically and solve CAPTCHAs.Â
Scraper API allows you to customize request type, IP geolocation, request headers, and many more easily.
Features.
- Scraper API has more than 40 million IP addresses
- Easy automation of complication tasks such as rendering JavaScript pages, handling CAPTCHAs, changing IP addresses, etc
- Almost no downtime
- Unlimited bandwidth, this means you get charged for only successful requests
- They have a responsive and professional support
- Scapingbee
Scrapingbee is another powerful web scraper with impeccable proxy management and headless browser handling. These tools can scrape data from JavaScript rendered pages and also tweak the proxies for every request so that you won’t get blocked by the server. Scraping bee also has an API that is dedicated to scraping the Google search engine.
Features
- Has an API for scraping Google search
- Can scrape Javascript-rendered pages
- Changes IP for every request
- It has great support for scraping from Amazon
- It can be linked to Google Sheet and used directly
- Import.io
Import.io is a Software as a Service (SaaS) tool that can be integrated into the web for converting semi-structured data in websites to structured data. The web scraping process can be done in real-time through its JSON REST-based and streaming APIs. Besides, import.io can be integrated with a lot of programming languages and data science tools.
Features
- It can be used for data extraction in semi-structured web pages
- Diversified data retrieval
- IP extraction
- Telephone number extraction
- Emails extraction
- Image extraction
- Document extraction
- Xtract.io
Xtract.io is a fantastic web scraper tool that is used to scrape structured data from web pages, social media platforms, text editors, PDFs, emails, etc into a clean business-ready format.
Features:
- It can do more specific tasks such as getting financial information, location data, contact details of the company, reviews and ratings, job posting, product catalogs, etc. These data can be used on-the-go for data analysis.
- They have powerful APIs that allow you to integrate the scraped data straight into your application.
- You can automate the entire process of data extraction
- Extracted data can be in text file, JSON, CSV, HTML format
- It solves CAPTCHAs so that data collection can be done in real-time and with ease.
- Octoparse
Octoparse is a popular and free web scraper. Even without coding, you can extract data from web pages in a structured form. All in a matter of clicks.
Features
- Simple to use. You do not need any coding experience.
- Automated rotation of IPs to avoid getting blocked
- Supports scheduled tasks. It could be on an hourly, daily, monthly basis, etc
- It can be used for websites with infinite scrolling, drop-down menus, logins, AJAX, etc
- Data can be downloaded in XLSX, CSV format or can be saved to a database.
- Webhose.io
Webhose.io is one advanced API for web scraping that is used to get data from millions of web sources in a structured form.
- Machine-readable
- It is worldwide coverage
- Data is structured
- Luminati
Luminati is a great web scraping tool that allows you to automate the web scraping process and displays the result finely in a dashboard. This allows you to tailor the scraped data to your business needs, whether it be social network data, market research, eCommerce trends, etc.
Features
- Its interface and dashboard is easy to relate with
- It gives you full control over its automated web scraping process
- Data collection can be done in real-time and affects changes from target websites
- You can build a data collection pipeline quickly.
- ScrapingBot
ScrapingBot is a fantastic tool for scraping data from a website URL. Its API can be used for specific needs such as getting the raw HTML file from a webpage, scraping listings from an eCommerce website, and also an email dedicated to scraping data from real estate websites.
Features
- It can render Javascript pagesÂ
- Full page HTML
- It can be used for huge bulk scraping needsÂ
- Has a free monthly usage planÂ
- It can do up to 20 simultaneous requestsÂ
- Apify SDK
Apify SDK is a scalable web scraping tool that is dedicated to scraping Javascript web pages. You can do web automation and data extraction with headless chrome.
Features
- It is used for Javascript rendering
- You can automate web scraping
- Web scraping can be done easily and quickly.
- It can be used both locally and on the cloud.
- ParseHub
ParseHub is a free web scraper that is used to get data from websites in spreadsheets. ParseHub is easy to use as it involves simple clicks on the data you wish to scrape.Â
Features
- Simple interface
- You need to simply click on the data you want to extract, be it texts, images, or attributesÂ
- It can be used for web pages in JavaScript and AJAX
- It can extract tones of data in a matter of minutesÂ
- Data collectors can be stored in local servers
- Dat can be download in CSV files or connected to REST API
Other worthy mentions include:
- Wintr
- Mozenda
- Dexi Intelligent
- ProWebScraper
- Outwit
- Data streamer
- Diffbot
- FMiner
- Content Grabber
- Web Harvey
- Kimura
- Visual Web Ripper
Some of these tools listed here are paid while some others are free. Make sure to select the ones that best fit your need. Some of the factors to consider when selecting a web scraper for you are:
- Price
- The functionality of the tool
- Ease of usage
- Customer Support
- Data formats it supports
- Crawling efficiency
NB: The order of this list does not indicate our recommendations in any way. You are at liberty to select the ones that suit your needs particularly.
2 Responses
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That’s a really great post, Steven 🙂
Thing is, I’m trying to wrap my head around web scraping at this point. I tried a bunch of blog posts and web scraping tools so far, such as these guys https://www.datashake.com/scraper-api and some of the services you mentioned in your post.
But the really awesome thing is that your article mentions something I haven’t seen elsewhere and that’s exactly what I’ve been searching for 🙂 I’m referring to your statement that Scraping bee has an API that is dedicated specifically to Google search engine results. Do you happen to know if it’s possible to define from what location it’s going to check search results for? I mean, suppose it need their API to check search results for users based in NYC or LA. is there a way to configure that? All and every help will be much appreciated 🙂