18 Web Scraping Tools for Extracting Online Data

Web scraping tools (also called web data extractor) are specially designed to gather data from websites via crawler usually made in Python, Java and Ruby. They are mainly used by bloggers, webmasters, journalist, data scientist and researchers to harvest data from a certain sites in a structured way which cannot be done easily through manual copy-paste technique.

The web extracting tools are also being used by online market analysts and SEO to pull out data from competitor’s websites. The data could be anything like valuable links, emails targeted keywords, plugin used and traffic source. It could also be used to track prices from different markets and extract contact information.

There are already hundreds of premium and free web extracting tools available on the internet for both commercial and personal use. Outwit Firefox extension and Google Web Scrapers are a few basic tools, but if you want something more flexible with extra functionalities, check out these listed tools.

18. Mozenda

Mozenda quickly turns webpage content into structured data, all without coding and IT resources. It lets you organize and prepare data files for publishing, and export in various format like XML, CSV or TSV. You can also pull data using their fully featured API.

The low maintenance scraper allows you to focus on reporting and analytics. There are convenient publishing options, error handing and notification features, along with comprehensive support and services. The only negative point is there is no free version available.

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17. Scrapy

Scrapy is an open source and collaborative framework for extracting the data you need from websites. Here you can build and run your web spiders and deploy them on cloud or host the spiders on your own server. You just need to write the rules to extract the data from web pages and let Scrapy crawl the entire site. It can crawl up to 500 sites daily.

Scrapy could be used for a wide range of purposes, from data mining to monitoring and automated testing. The framework is written in Python, and it’s easy to attach new code for extensibility without having to touch the core part. However, the installation process is quite confusing, especially for beginners.

16. WebHarvy

WebHarvy can automatically scrape texts, images, emails and URLs, and save the scraped data in multiple formats. There is absolutely no need to write any script as it comes with an inbuilt browser to navigate web pages. It automatically identifies the pattern of data occurring in web pages, so you need not to perform any additional configuration.

WebHarvy also allows you to apply Regular Expressions on text or HTML source and scrape the matching portion. In order to scrape anonymously and prevent software from being blocked by web servers, you have the option to access target site via proxy servers. The single user license will cost you $99.

15. Wachete

Wachete tracks changes on any website you want to monitor. You can select how often the tool should check for changes, setup clever notifications and get alerted over email or via mobile app. It gathers all changes and displays them as a table and chart. You can then download the data directly to your computer.

With Wachete you can easily automate repetitive tasks and save time. Store owners can monitor at what price the competitor is selling the same product as you do, recruiter could receive notification when companies post new job offers, and as a website owner know when one of your pages is not available. The add-on is available for Chrome, Firefox and Opera. The free version monitors 10 pages, checks for changes every 6 hours and delivers 10 email alerts per day.

14. 80legs

80legs provides access to massive web crawling platform that you can configure according to your needs. It fetches a huge amount of data in seconds, and lets you search the entire data quickly along with the option to download the extracted data.

The tool claims to crawl over half a million domains and is used by big companies like PayPal, Shareaholic and MailChimp. The free plan includes 10,000 URLs per crawl and can be upgraded to intro plan that offers up to 100,000 URLs per crawl for $29 per month.

13. FMiner

FMiner is a software for web data extraction, screen scraping, web crawling and web harvesting. It handles all complex data extraction process, including multi-layered multi-table crawls, Ajax+JavaScript handling and proxy server lists. You can use simple point and click interface to record a scrap project much as you would click through the target website. The output can be saved in various formats, including SQL, CSV and Excel.

FMiner is developed for Windows and Mac OS; you can download and use 15 days free trail. If you want to continue, the basic version will cost you $168 (one time fees).

12. Octoparse

Octoparse is made by combining the words octopus and parse, means they can crawl large amount of sites and data on the internet like octopus. It is easy to use, as it provides simple point and click element feature, eliminating the coding requirement. Advanced matching technology extracts data automatically and converts them into CSV format.

Octoparse is capable to deal with JS, Ajax, cookies, redirects, and supports XPath, RegEx and IP rotation. The company claims that more than 30,000 real-time data is generated on daily basis, supporting over 160,000 enterprises. The free version lets you manage 10 projects, and the standard version starts with $89 per month.

11. Fivefilters

Fivefilters is an online scraper available for commercial use. It offers easy content extraction using full-text RSS tool which can identify and extract content from news articles, blog posts, Wikipedia entries and more, and returns it in an easy to parse format. Moreover, it features quick article extraction, multi-page support, auto detection, and you can deploy on the cloud server without any database.

10. Easy Web Extract

A web scraper software for content extraction fitting to any demand. It can pull out any listed information in any pattern and then you can export scraped results to multiple data formats for both online and offline purposes.

The tool also supports image list type to download all product images from a web region, robust transformation scripts to transform scraped data in any kind of form, and random extracting delay to avoid blocking by remote hosts. The trial software extracts 200 results, valid for 14 days.

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9. Scrapinghub

Scrapinghub is a cloud based web crawling platform that allows you to easily deploy crawlers and scale them on demand. You don’t need to worry about servers, monitoring and backups. The data gets saved in high-availability database, and you can browse it, share it with your team from dashboard.

The platform supports many add-ons that let you extend your crawlers in clicks, bypass bot counter-measuers so you can crawl large and complex sites faster. A team of experts is available if you face any problem. The free service provides you 1 crawl at a time, 7 day data retention and 24 hour maximum job run time.

8. Scrapebox

Don’t get fooled by its simplicity; Scrapebox is a very powerful tool for SEO experts and online marketers. It allows you to check page rank, grab emails, check high valued backlinks, export URLs, verify working proxies, check indexed pages, find unregistered domains, and dozens of more time-saving features are available.

Scarpebox supports exceptionally fast operation with multiple concurrent connections, and numerous options for expansion and customization to suit your needs. Using thousands of rotating proxies you will be able to sneak on the competitor keywords, do research on organization/government sites, and comment without getting blocked. There is no free trial, you have to pay $97 to purchase the product.

7. Grepsr

Grepsr is online web scraping solution for business people and teams to source reliable and accurate data for better decision-making. It gives you clean, fresh and organized web data without IT. You can automate workflows by setting automated rules for extraction, and by organizing and prioritizing data.

Grepsr lets you mark and tag information via one click file sharing tool, schedule your extraction, and get extracted information emailed to you as soon as they come. The extracted information could be saved as CSV files, PDF documents and XML feeds. Pricing starts at $129 per month.

6. VisualScraper

VisualScraper extracts data from several pages and fetches the results in real-time. You can easily collect and manage data with its point and click interface. The output could be exported in various formats, including JSON, XML, SQL and CSV. Moreover, they provide a web scraping service, that means you can hire an agent to do scraping stuff.

The free version allows you to store unlimited projects, over 50,000 records and gives you 100 MB space. The premium one starts from $49 per month with access to 100,000 pages.

5. Spinn3r

Spinn3r is an advanced web crawler that lets you fetch a wide range of data, from blogs, mainstream news to social media sites and RSS feeds. It is integrated with Firehose API (powered by JSON), which handles 95% of data indexing requirements. The full-text search allows for precise queries over huge amount of data.

Spinn3r offers language and spam detection+protection feature, which removes inappropriate language and spams, thus improving data security. It also takes care of duplicate content and ads served on the webpage. You can take one week trail, after that payments are charged monthly.

4. Dexi.io

Dexi.io is a web processing tool to extract, enrich and connect. The Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tool extracts and transforms the data from any web source. You can use the visual data pipe tool to normalize, transform, and enrich data, and build engine for handling all your data sources. It also gives you liberty to connect data from any data source to any destination with a few clicks.

Dexi is a browser-based editor to set up crawlers and extract real-time data, and you can save the collected data on other cloud platforms like Google drive, or export as JSON or CSV. The price starts at $99 per month. However, the free version gives 60 minutes execution time.

3. PurseHub

PurseHub is built to extract data from anywhere, including multi-page apps. It can handle Ajax cookies, JavaScript, session and redirects. It uses machine learning technique for its state-of-the-art relationship engine, and can understand complex hierarchies of objects and how they fit together. So you don’t need to waste time figuring out how a webpage is structured.

With PurseHub, you can easily fill in forms, login to sites, loop through dropdowns, deal with infinite scrolling pages, and even click on interactive maps. Apart from the web app, it is also available as desktop tool for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, which covers 5 crawl projects, free of cost.

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2. Webhose.io

Webhose.io is a browser-based application that lets you easily integrate data from hundreds of thousands of online sources, and this includes news, message boards, blogs, comments, reviews and more. It supports data extraction in more than 240 languages and save the output information in several formats.

The tool also allows you to filter the gathered data by leveraging their wide variety of search parameters. Collect the information you require and omit the garbage. There is no need of any lengthy integration, time consuming coding, or maintenance from user’s side of view. Free account gets up to 1000 requests per month.

1. Import.io

Import.io is an advanced tool for extracting website data at different levels. It allows you to make your own datasets by simply importing the content from a particular webpage and exporting the same to CSV. You can build over thousand API with integration option (such as Google Sheets, Excel, Plot.ly, etc.) based on your requirements.

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Their Magic Tool lets you convert a website into a table and easily scrap thousands of webpages in minutes. For more complex websites, you will need to download their desktop application (free of cost), available for all platform including Linux, Windows and iOS.