Best web Scraping APIs and Tools. What kinds of data extraction tools are there?

Best web Scraping APIs and Tools. What kinds of data extraction tools are there?

Before diving into lists and trying to find the one best tool for you, it would be a lot easier to go over the different types of scrapers out there. All tools that fall into the same category have several characteristics in common. Knowing which type you want will speed up the process.

At the head of the list are the web scraping APIs.

An Application Programming Interface (API) is a computing interface that connects several programs. Programmers use them to define a precise method through which said software can communicate and send data.

In essence, APIs connect different programs, allowing them to work together without the need to have identical architectures and parameters. With it, you can create increasingly complex systems that use plenty of different programs.

We’ll analyze ten data extraction APIs:

• WebScrapingAPI
• ScrapeHero
• Scraper API
• ScraperBox
• ZenScrape
• Scrapingdog
• Diffbot
• ScrapingBot
• ScrapingBee
• ScraperStack

Next on the chopping block are visual web scraping tools. Unlike APIs, these products focus on ease of use and user experience instead of integration with other software.

These tools can either work on your computer or straight in the browser and offer you an interface (usually point-and-click) through which you select the content to scrape. That’s the “visual” part.

Besides the difference in user input, visual tools are similar to APIs. They have more or less the same functionalities, but APIs tend to be less expensive. Still, you’ll see differences from product to product.

In this article, we’ll show you five visual web scraping tools:

• OutWit Hub
• Import.io
• Octoparse
• ParseHub
• Dexi.io

Lastly, we’ll look at programming tools for building web scrapers. Making your own web scraper does require some work and knowledge, but it’s still doable. Whether you’re interested in extracting data with as little expenditure as possible or just find the idea of making your own bot appealing, you don’t have to start from scratch.

Different libraries, frameworks, and various code bits can be freely found online and used to create your scraper. In a sense, you don’t actually have to write most of the code necessary for scraping, just find them and integrate them into your script.

While some functionalities, like Javascript rendering, can be arranged easily, proxies can still be a problem. After all, server maintenance costs money, and relying on public proxies is both inefficient and risky. So, building your scraper will still mean spending some money if you want to create an effective tool.

Web Scraping open source. The best open source web automation tools for 2022

Bonus: if you like our content and this “Open Source Web Scraping Tools” guide, you can join our web browser automation  Slack community .

The rise of Open Source Software (OSS) in the last years, especially after the establishment of GitHub as the de-facto platform for open source projects, brought many great development tools and libraries to a broad audience of developers who now benefit from them daily. With so many existing options, however, how can we decide what best suits our needs?

There are so many repositories, that simply finding the best one for your project can be a large task. Trying different alternatives and then deciding which to use can work, but that’s time-consuming. In this article, we have taken care of the research for you! We will share some of the best Open Source libraries of 2022 for web automation and testing, based on specific criteria that guarantee a robust and productive development experience.

The methodology used to construct this list of open source web automation tools

Before we present the list of our top picks, let’s take some time to discuss the methodology that resulted in our choices. As mentioned, GitHub is the most extensive repository of open-source projects. It also provides excellent statistics regarding a project’s overall quality and social engagement that can aid our conclusions. To make the list a project we should meet as many of the following requirements as possible:

• The project should be well maintained; the project’s maintainer(s) is/are responding to issues and integrating code contributions. In the best scenario, the project is actively developed as well, with maintainers regularly introducing new releases. 
• Many active maintainers and collaborators work on the project.
• The public API should be stable to prevent future versions from breaking changes. 
• The repository should be well structured, with a clear branch hierarchy.
• The git commits should be atomic , with descriptive messages and references to specific issues.
• JavaScript projects should be published on NPM and retain many monthly downloads. This signifies that people trust and use the project in production environments.
• The project should provide clear documentation on how to operate the corresponding library. 
• Institutions and individuals back the project, which signifies the importance of the project to the overall ecosystem. 
• All the features and mechanics are thoroughly tested. 
• A Continuous Integration pipeline is established to automate the integration of code changes.

Free web Scraper. 20 Best Free Web Scraper Software For Windows

Here is a list of the best free web scraper software for windows . These software prove out to be very useful when you have to work with large amounts of data. Some of these software are quite basic and require no extra knowledge on your part, while others require you to have knowledge of Regular Expressions , and knowledge in some other fields as well like JavaScript . The data that is useful to you is beautifully sorted out. Some of these also let you automate the task so that the data is automatically retrieved with the click of a button. A time period can also be specified so that the data is updated after an allocated time limit.

Best Free Web Scraper Software:

The web scraper software that I like the most is Web Scraper . It is due to the fact that it is quite simple, lightweight, and easy to use. You can use it to scrape different types of data from the web like link, text, table, and many more such elements. Here you can also add multiple URLs. It also generates a selector graph. The scraped data can be exported in the CSV format. You can also choose the option to store the data on local storage or CouchDB .

You can also check out the list of RSS Reader Software , Website Downloader Software , and Broken Link Checker Software .

Web Scraper

Web Scraper is a Chrome plugin which is used for scraping data from a website. It is a good web scraping software where you can get different types of data information, like: text, link, popup link, image, table, element attribute, HTML, element , and many more. In order to use the Web Scraper feature, you have to undertake the following steps:

• Install the Chrome Extension.
• Browse to the Web Scraper tab.
• Click on the button create new sitemap and add the sitemap name and start URL.
• In case you want to work with the existing sitemap, enter the sitemap JSON, and sitemap name.
• Then after that the sitemap can be easily imported.
• On creating the sitemap, choose the option to add new selector.
• Here you have to add selector ID, type, selector, regex, delay, and parent selector.
• The selector type may be either text, link, popup link, image, table, element attribute, HTML, element, element scroll down, element click, or grouped.
• Based on the attributes of the sitemap, a selector graph can be generated.
• Click on the Scrape button to scrape the data.
• Then click the export data as CSV button which downloads the scraped data in CSV format.
• Sitemap can also be exported, metadata can also be edited, and selectors can be previewed edited, and deleted.

Video Scraper. Vget for YouTube:

Although there are loads of plugins for Chrome browser you can use to download videos from YouTube, like this one saveFrom Hleper which I’m using. It’s quite versatile, not only for YouTube,but also for any online video-site else and quite well get along with the browser. Just like this:

Two new buttons attached on the page. However, the shortage is that you have to manually download the videos one by one. If you want to download a channel’s all videos the arduous work emerged. ———– What I want it is using the YouTube API to retrieve all the videos’ address and input them into program and analysis their addresses and download. After searching in Google, I found Vget Home which is what I want. You can read through examples list on that page. Essentially, this lib using YouTubeParser.java to extract video link via matching regex.

Scrapy. Introducing Scrapy

A framework is a reusable, “semi-complete” application that can be specialized to produce custom applications. (Source: Johnson & Foote, 1988 )

In other words, the Scrapy framework provides a set of Python scripts that contain most of the code required to use Python for web scraping. We need only to add the last bit of code required to tell Python what pages to visit, what information to extract from those pages, and what to do with it. Scrapy also comes with a set of scripts to setup a new project and to control the scrapers that we will create.

It also means that Scrapy doesn’t work on its own. It requires a working Python installation (Python 2.7 and higher or 3.4 and higher - it should work in both Python 2 and 3), and a series of libraries to work. If you haven’t installed Python or Scrapy on your machine, you can refer to the setup instructions . If you install Scrapy as suggested there, it should take care to install all required libraries as well.

scrapy version

in a shell. If all is good, you should get the following back (as of February 2017):

Scrapy 2.1.0

If you have a newer version, you should be fine as well.

To introduce the use of Scrapy, we will reuse the same example we used in the previous section. We will start by scraping a list of URLs from the list of faculty of the Psychological & Brain Sciences and then visit those URLs to scrape detailed information about those faculty members.

Best web scrapers. 13 Best Web Scraping Tools & Software to Extract Online Data in 2023

Data Scraping Tools & Web Scrapers

Data scraping tools are the need in the 21st century as we approach a world where data is the fuel for every domain.

Throughout my career, I’ve tried and tested different web scraping software. Some of these website scraping tools were trash (don’t worry I haven’t included them in this post), while others were the real deal.

If you don’t want to waste your time hopping around for the best web scraping tool, then keep reading because in this post you’ll learn which online web scraper is best for your needs.

But before diving into some of the most popular web data scraping tools, let’s understand what web scraping is.

What Web Scraping is & Why Use Web Scraping Tools & Software

Web scraping is the art of extracting or harvesting data through web pages via different means. The data pulled is then put in a format that is more understandable to the end user.

Use Cases of Web Scraping

• Lead Generation
• SEO
• Market Trends
• Sports Betting Odd Analysis
• Price Comparison
• Academic Research
• Real Estate Data Collection

And many more!! There could be endless use cases of web scraping. Each industry can leverage maximum when they extract data from their niche market.

Want to know more about web scraping? Read this article that explains web scraping from scratch !!

Factors to Consider Before Choosing the Web Scraping Software/Tools

What sort of data would you like to collect?

Before web scraping for your business needs, you should determine what kind of data you want to analyze.

This is necessary because the methods you employ for data collection will vary based on the Data Format you want.

Check what format the data from your target website is in and organize it into a usable format.

How fast do you need the data to be collected?

Another determining factor in choosing the right web data scraping tool is the speed of. If you project that you need the data at a certain rate, examine what your current reaction time will be.

Check the latency of different tools, and pick the one whose pricing and response time suit your needs.

How significant is the delay in the data collection process?

It is crucial to make sure that there is no significant time gap in data collection.

The tool you have should be able to complete the scraping project quickly enough so as not to miss key details that may come up. Allowing for a considerable delay in data collection can potentially cause you to miss opportunities that you may have otherwise been able to exploit.

What is the level of your technical expertise?

If you are relatively new to the technical aspects of web scraping, consider using tools that have a lower learning curve. These will likely be tools that allow you to use point-and-click gestures with a GUI interface to extract data more easily from web pages.

How much are you willing to spend?

The price of a tool has to be weighed against the benefits it provides. Choose a website scraping tool that strikes a balance between price and functionality based on your project requirements and the features you need.

What is the competency of the vendor based on customer support?

Vendors offer various levels of customer support. As a buyer, you should always make sure that the vendor you are working with offers the best customer support possible. Examine the various customer support channels a vendor provides and gauge the quality of customer support they offer.

Best Web Scraping Tools To Consider

Scrapingdog

Scrapingdog

Scrapingdog is a very high-end web data scraping program that provides millions of proxies for scraping. It offers data scraping services with capabilities like rendering JavaScript & bypassing captchas.

Along with the general web scraping API, scrapingdog has dedicated APIs. These are: –

• Zillow Scraper API

Scrapingdog offers two kinds of solutions:

1. Software is built for users with less technical knowledge. As you can see in the above image you can manually adjust almost anything from rendering JavaScript to handling premium proxies. This software also provides structured data in JSON format if you specify particular tags & attributes of the data you are trying to scrape.
2. API is built for developers. You will be able to scrape websites by just mentioning queries inside the API URI. You can read its. Their interactive API makes them one of the best scrapers out there in the market right now.

Pros

• Provide a generous free pack with 1000 API calls.
• Scraper is the fastest in the market.
• The success rate for major websites like amazon.com is close to 99%.

Cons

• Suitable for users with little to advanced knowledge of programming. Non-developers cannot use Scrapingdog.