17-08-2021

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Best Web Browser Best Web Scraping Tools
Best Web Scraping Tool

You can use to scrape web data and turns unstructured or semi-structured data from websites into a structured data set. It also provides ready to use web scraping templates including Amazon, eBay, Twitter, BestBuy, and many others. Octoparse also provides web data service that helps customize scrapers based on your scraping needs. You will be able to scrape websites by just mentioning queries inside the. Diffbot has been transitioning away from a traditional web scraping tool to. Web scraping tools are a great alternative to extract data from web pages. In this post, we will share with you the most popular web scraping tools to extract data. With these automated data. Data Miner is a data extraction tool that lets you scrape any HTML web page. You can extract tables and lists from any page and upload them to Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. With Data Miner you can export web pages into XLS, CSV, XLSX or TSV files (.xls.csv.xlsx.tsv) You can use Data Miner for FREE with the starter subscription plan. Apify SDK is one of the best web scrapers built in JavaScript. The scalable scraping library enables the development of data extraction and web automation jobs with headless Chrome and Puppeteer.

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15 Best Web Scraping Tools for Extracting Online Data

Since harvesting data manually can be time-consuming and painstaking, a wide range of automated tools have been developed to assist users in making this process fast and smooth. To assist you in making the right decision on the best one to use, we reviewed the best web scraping tools based on these four factors:

Features: We scrutinized the distinguishing features of each of the web data extractors.
Deployment method: We evaluated how each of the tools can be deployed—browser extension, cloud, desktop, or any other.
Output format: We looked at the format each of the tools uses to deliver the scraped content.
Price: We assessed the cost of using each of the tools.

Ultimately, we created the following list of the 15 best web scraping tools for extracting online data:

Zenscrape
Scrapy
Beautiful Soup
ScrapeSimple
Web Scraper
ParseHub
Diffbot
Puppeteer
Apify
Data Miner
Import.io
Parsers.me
Dexi.io
ScrapeHero
Scrapinghub

Let’s get started with the list of best web scraping tools:

1. Zenscrape (zenscrape.com)

Zenscrape is a hassle-free API that offers lightning-fast and easy-to-use capabilities for extracting large amounts of data from online resources.

Features: It offers excellent features to make web scraping quick and reliable. To provide users with a painless experience, Zenscrape has different proxy servers for each use case. For example, if a website prevents web scraping, you can use its premium proxies, which are available in more than 300 locations, to sidestep the restriction. Furthermore, it also has a vast pool of more than 30 million IP addresses, which you can use to rotate IP addresses and avoid getting blocked. Zenscrape also extracts data from websites built with any of modern programming frameworks, such as React, Angular, or Vue. With Zenscrape, you’ll not need to worry about any queries per second (QPS) limitations.

Deployment method: The Zenscrape scraping API executes requests in modern headless Chrome browsers. This way, websites are rendered using JavaScript just in the same way real browsers complete the rendering, ensuring you retrieve what everyday users see.

Output format: It returns a JSON object that has the HTML markup of the scraped content.

Price: Zenscrape offers different pricing plans to suit every use case. There is a free plan that allows you to make 1,000 requests per month. The paid plans start from $8.99 per year to $199.99 per year. Due to it’s generous free plan, it is also among the best free web scraping tools.

2. Scrapy (scrapy.org)

Scrapy is an open sourced Python-based framework that offers a fast and efficient way of extracting data from websites and online services.

Features: The Scrapy framework is used to create web crawlers and scrapers for harvesting data from websites. With Scrapy, you can build highly extensible and flexible applications for performing a wide range of tasks, including data mining, data processing, and historical archival. Getting up and running with Scrapy is easy, mainly because of its extensive documentation and supportive community that can assist you in solving any development challenges. Furthermore, there are several middleware modules and tools that have been created to help you in making the most of Scrapy. For example, you can use Scrapy Cloud to run your crawlers in the cloud, making it one of the best free web scraping tools.

Deployment method: It can be installed to run on multiple platforms, including Windows, Linux, BSD, and Mac.

Output format: Data can be exported in XML, CSV, or JSON formats.

Price: Scrapy is available for free.

3. Beautiful Soup (https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/)

Beautiful Soup is an open sourced Python-based library designed to make pulling data from web pages easy and fast.

Features: Beautiful Soup is useful in parsing and scraping data from HTML and XML documents. It comes with elaborate Pythonic idioms for altering, searching, and navigating a parse tree. It automatically transforms the incoming documents and outgoing documents to Unicode and UTF-8 character encodings, respectively. With just a few lines of code, you can setup your web scraping project using Beautiful Soup and start gathering valuable data. Furthermore, there is a healthy community to assist you in overcoming any implementation challenges. That’s what makes it one of the best web scraping tools.

Deployment method: It can be installed to run on multiple platforms, including Windows, Linux, BSD, and Mac.

Output format: It returns scraped data in HTML and XML formats.

Price: It’s available for free.

4. ScrapeSimple (scrapesimple.com)

ScrapeSimple provides a service that creates and maintains web scrapers according to the customers’ instructions.

Features: ScrapeSimple allows you to harvest information from any website, without any programming skills. After telling them what you need, they’ll create a customized web scraper that gathers information on your behalf. If you want a simple way of scraping online data, then this service could best meet your needs.

Deployment method: It periodically emails you the scraped data.

Output format: Data is delivered in CSV format.

Price: Price depends on the size of each project.

5. Web Scraper (webscraper.io)

Web Scraper is a simple and efficient tool that takes the pain out of web data extraction.

Features: Web Scraper allows you to retrieve data from dynamic websites; it can navigate a site with multiple levels of navigation and extract its content. It implements full JavaScript execution, Ajax requests wait-up, and page scroll down capabilities to optimize data extraction from modern websites. Furthermore, Web Scraper has a modular selector system that allows you to create sitemaps from various types of selectors and customize data scraping depending on the structure of each site. You can also use the tool to schedule scraping, rotate IP addresses to prevent blockades, and execute scrapers via an API.

Deployment method: Web Scraper can be deployed as a browser extension or in the cloud.

Output format: Scraped data is returned in the CSV format. You can export it to Dropbox.

Price: The browser extension is provided for free. The paid plans, which come with added features, are priced from $50 per month to more than $300 per month.

6. Parsehub (parsehub.com)

ParseHub is a powerful tool that allows you to harvest data from any dynamic website, without the need of writing any web scraping scripts.

Features: ParseHub provides an easy-to-use graphical interface for collecting data from interactive websites. After specifying the target website and clicking the places you need data to be scraped from, ParseHub’s machine learning technology takes over with the magic, and pulls out the data in seconds. Since it supports JavaScript, redirects, AJAX requests, sessions, cookies, and other technologies, ParseHub can be used to scrape data from any type of website, even the most outdated ones. Furthermore, it supports automatic IP rotation, scheduled data collection, data retention for up to 30 days, and regular expressions.

Deployment method: Apart from the web application, it can also be deployed as a desktop application for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems.

Output format: Scraped data can be accessed through JSON, Google Sheets, CSV/Excel, Tableau, or API. You can also save images and files to S3 or Dropbox.

Price: You can use Parsehub for free, but you’ll only access a limited number of features. To access more features, you’ll need to go for any of its paid plans, which starts from $149 per month to more than $499 per month.

7. Diffbot (diffbot.com)

Diffbot differs from most other web scrapers because it uses computer vision and machine learning technologies (instead of HTML parsing) to harvest data from web pages.

Features: Diffbot uses the innovative computer vision technology to visually parse web pages for relevant elements and then outputs them in a structured format. This way, it becomes easier to collect the essential information and discount the elements not valuable to the primary content. Notably, the Knowledge Graph feature allows you to dig into an extensive interlinked database of various content and retrieve clean, structured data. It also offers dynamic IPs and data storage for up to 30 days.

Deployment method: Diffbot offers a wide range of automatic APIs for extracting data from web articles, discussion forums, and more. For example, you can deploy the Crawlbot API to retrieve data from entire websites.

Output format: It returns the scooped data in various formats, including HTML, JSON, and CSV.

Price: Diffbot offers a 14-day free trial period for testing its products. Thereafter, you can go for any of its paid plans, which starts from $299 per month to $3,999 per month.

8. Puppeteer (pptr.dev)

Puppeteer is a Node-based headless browser automation tool often used to retrieve data from websites that require JavaScript for displaying content.

Features: Puppeteer comes with full capabilities for accessing the Chromium or Chrome browser. Consequently, most manual browser tasks can be completed using Puppeteer. For example, you can use the tool to crawl web pages and create pre-rendered content, create PDFs, take screenshots, and automate various tasks. It is backed by Google’s Chrome team and it has an impressive open source community; therefore, you can get quick support in case you have any implementation issues.

Deployment method: It offers a high-level API for taking over the Chromium or Chrome browser. Although Puppeteer runs headless by default, it can be tailored to run non-headless browser.

Output format: It returns extracted data in various formats, including JSON and HTML.

Price: It’s available for free.

9. Apify (apify.com)

Apify is a scalable solution for performing web scraping and automation tasks.

Features: Apify allows you to crawl websites and scoop content using the provided JavaScript code. With the tool, you can extract HTML pages and convert them to PDF, extract Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs), scan web pages and send notifications whenever something changes, extract location information from Google Places, and automate workflows such as filling web forms. It also provides support for Puppeteer.

Deployment method: Apify can be deployed using the Chrome browser, as a headless Chrome in the cloud, or as an API.

Output format: It returns harvested data in various formats, including Excel, CSV, JSON, and PDF.

Price: There is a free 30-day trial version that allows you to test the features of the tool before committing to a monthly plan, which starts from $49 per month to more than $499 per month.

10. Data Miner (data-miner.io)

Data Miner is a simple tool for scraping data from websites in seconds.

Features: With Data Miner, you can extract data with one click (without writing a line of code), run custom extractions, perform bulk scraping based on a list of URLs, extract data from websites with multiple inner pages, and fill forms automatically. You can also use it for extracting tables and lists.

Deployment method: It’s available as a Chrome extension.

Output format: Data Miner exports scraped content into CSV, TSV, XLS, and XLSX files.

Price: You can use the tool for free, but you’ll be limited to 500 pages per month. To get higher scrape limits and more functionalities, you’ll need to go for any of the paid plans, which starts from $19.99 per month to $200 per month.

11. Import.io (import.io)

Import.io eliminates the intricacies of working with web data by allowing you to harvest and structure data from websites easily.

Features: With Import.io, you can leverage web data and make well-informed decisions. It provides a user-friendly interface that allows you to retrieve data from web pages and organize them into datasets. After pointing and clicking at the target content, Import.io uses sophisticated machine learning techniques that learn to harvest them into your dataset. Furthermore, it delivers charts and dashboards to enhance the visualization of the scraped data as well as custom reporting tools to ensure you make the most of the data. You can also use the tool to get website screenshots and obey the stipulations in the robots.txt file.

Deployment method: Import.io can be deployed in the cloud or as an API.

Output format: It delivers retrieved data in various formats, including CSV, JPEG, and XLS.

Price: There is a free version that comes with basic features for extracting web data. If you need advanced features, you’ll need to contact them for specific pricing.

12. Parsers.me (persers.me)

Parsers.me is a versatile web scraping tool that allows you to extract unstructured data with ease.

Features: Parsers.me is designed to extract JavaScript, directories, single data, tables, images, URLs, and other web resources. After selecting the necessary information to be scraped from the target site, the tool automatically completes the process for you. It uses machine learning techniques to get similar pages on the website and retrieve the required information, without the need of specifying elaborate settings. Furthermore, the tool lets you generate charts with analyzed data, schedule the start of scraping, and view scraping history.

Deployment method: It is deployed as a Chrome browser extension.

Output format: It gives results in Excel, JSON, CSV, XML, XLS, or XLSX formats.

Price: You can use Parsers.me for free, but you’ll be limited to 1,000 page scrape credits every month. Beyond the free subscription plan, you can go for any of its paid plans, which starts from $19.99 per month to $199 per month.

13. Dexi.io (dexi.io)

Dexi.io is an intelligent, automated web extraction software that applies sophisticated robot technology to provide users with fast and efficient results.

Features: Dexi.io offers a point-and-click UI for automating the extraction of web pages. The Dexi.io platform has three main types of robots: Extractor, Crawler, and Pipes. Extractors are the most advanced robots used for performing a wide range of tasks, Crawlers are used for gathering a large number of URLs and other basic information from sites, and Pipes are used for automating data processing tasks. Furthermore, Dexi.io provides several other functionalities, including CAPTCHA solving, forms filling, and anonymous scraping through proxy servers.

Deployment method: It’s deployed as a browser-based web application.

Output format: You can save the scooped content directly to various online storage services, or export it as a CSV or JSON file.

Price: Dexi.io offers a wide range of paid plans, which can start from $119 per month to $699 per month.

14. ScrapeHero (scrapehero.com)

ScrapeHero is a fully managed enterprise-grade tool for web scraping and transforming unstructured data into useful data.

Features: ScrapeHero has a large worldwide infrastructure that makes extensive data extraction fast and trouble-free. With the tool, you can perform high-speed web crawling at 3,000 pages per second, schedule crawling tasks, and automate workflows. Furthermore, it handles complicated JavaScript/Ajax websites, solves CAPTCHA, and sidesteps IP blacklisting.

Deployment method: It’s deployed as a browser-based web application.

Output format: Extracted data is delivered in various formats, including XML, Excel, CSV, JSON, as custom APIs, and more.

Price: ScrapeHero’s pricing starts from $50 per month per website. There is also an enterprise plan, which is priced at $1,000 per month. You can also opt for the on-demand plan, which starts at $300 per website.

15. Scrapinghub (scrapinghub.com)

Scrapinghub provides quick and reliable web scraping services for converting websites into actionable data.

Features: Scrapinghub has two categories of tools for extracting data: data services and developer tools. The data services products provide you with accurate capabilities to extract data at any scale and from any website. The developer tools are suited for professional developers and data scientists looking to complete specialized scraping projects. There are four types of developer tools: Crawlera, Extraction API, Splash, and Scrapy Cloud. Furthermore, Scrapinghub is also involved in creating the earlier mentioned Scrapy tool, which is a popular open source web scraper.

Deployment method: Scrapinghub’s tools can be deployed in a variety of methods, including the cloud, desktop, or in the browser.

Output format: They give results in various formats, including JSON, CSV, and XML.

Price: Scrapinghub’s products and services are priced differently. For example, Crawlera, which is designed for ban management and proxy rotation, is priced from $25 per month to more than $1,000 per month.

Wrapping up

That’s our massive list of 15 best web scraping tools for harvesting online content!

The web is the largest information storehouse that man has ever created. Using one good web scraper, you can take unstructured data from the Internet and turn it into a structured format that can easily be consumed by other applications, which greatly enhances business outcomes and enables informed decision making.

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The data extraction process can be complicated, but with the right web scraping tools in your belt, you’ll be on your way to obtaining high quality web data in no time. Even with the right tools however, proper data scraping is no easy task. Between obtaining the correct page source, parsing the source correctly, rendering JavaScript, and obtaining data in a usable form, there’s a lot of work to be done. But if you’re running a modern business – whether startup, SMB or enterprise – being able to access accurate, reliable and real-time data is vital.

Why is scraping web data so important?

Because data is the key to increasing your sales and/or productivity. The modern-day Internet is an extremely noisy place – users create a mind-blowing 2.5 quintillion bytes of dataevery day. Whether you’re just about to launch your dream project or you’ve owned your business for decades, the information found in data is what helps you draw potential customers away from your competitors and keep them coming back. Web scraping, or extracting useful data from the Internet and converting it into a useful format (like a spreadsheet), is a key component to keeping your business or product from falling behind.

Web data tells you almost everything you need to know about those consumers, from the average prices they’re paying to the must-have features of the moment. But you could spend the rest of your life manually extracting data and you would never catch up. That’s where web or data scraping tools come in, and the process can be extremely intimidating.

What factors should you consider while selecting a web scraping tool?

It is difficult to say exactly what factors should be considered when choosing a data scraping tool. Of course, different users have very different needs, and there are tools out there for all of them. Some users want to build web scrapers without learning code, while others are developers who want to build web crawlers to scrape their own massive sites. Serious data enthusiasts want tools to do both and everything in between. That said, in the following list we’ve outlined our favorite web scraping tools, along with who might benefit most from using them and why that’s the case.

Whether you’re a data scraping newbie, or a seasoned developer, here is our list of the 10+ best web scraping tools available today. From open source projects to hosted SaaS solutions to desktop software, there is certain to be a web scraping tool that will work for your project.

1. Scraper API

Website: https://www.scraperapi.com/

Who this is for: Scraper API is a tool for developers building web scrapers, it handles proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs so developers can get the raw HTML from any website with a simple API call.

Why you should use it: Scraper API doesn’t burden you with managing your own proxies. Instead, it manages its own internal pool of hundreds of thousands of proxies from a dozen different proxy providers, and has smart routing logic that routes requests through different subnets. It also automatically throttles requests in order to avoid IP bans and CAPTCHAs – providing greater reliability. It’s the ultimate web scraping service for developers, with special pools of proxies for ecommerce price scraping, search engine scraping, social media scraping, sneaker scraping, ticket scraping and more! If you want to build the best web scraper, start with the best web scraping API. If you need to scrape data from millions of pages a month, you can use this form to ask for a volume discount.

2. ScrapeSimple

Website: https://www.scrapesimple.com

Who this is for: ScrapeSimple is the perfect service for people who want a custom web scraper tool built for them. It’s as simple as filling out a form with instructions for what kind of data you want.

Why you should use it: ScrapeSimple lives up to its name and takes its place near the top of our list of easy web scraping tools with a fully managed service that builds and maintains custom web scrapers for customers. Just tell them what information you need from which sites, and they will design a custom web scraper to deliver the information to you periodically (you can choose between daily, weekly, monthly) in CSV format directly to your inbox. This service is perfect for businesses that just want a html scraper without needing to write any code themselves. Response times are quick and the service is incredibly friendly and helpful, making this service perfect for people who just want the full data extraction process taken care of for them.

3. Octoparse

Website: https://www.octoparse.com/

Who this is for: Octoparse is a fantastic scraper tool for people who want to extract data from websites without having to code, while still having control over the full process with their easy-to-use user interface.

Why you should use it: Octoparse is one of the best screen scraping tools for people who want to scrape websites without learning to code. It features a point-and-click screen scraper, allowing users to scrape behind login forms, fill in forms, input search terms, scrolls through infinite scroll, render JavaScript, and more. It also includes a site parser and a hosted solution for users who want to run their scrapers in the cloud. Best of all, it comes with a generous free tier allowing users to build up to 10 crawlers for free. For enterprise-level customers, they also offer fully customized crawlers and managed solutions where they take care of running everything for you and just deliver the data to you directly.

4. ParseHub

Website: https://www.parsehub.com/

Who this is for: ParseHub is an incredibly powerful tool for building web scrapers without coding. It is used by analysts, journalists, data scientists, and everyone in between.

Why you should use it: ParseHub is exceedingly simple to use- you can build web scrapers simply by clicking on the data that you want. Parsehub then exports the data in JSON or Excel format. It has many handy features such as automatic IP rotation, allowing web page scraping behind login walls, going through dropdowns and tabs, getting data from tables and maps, and much much more. In addition, it has a generous free tier, allowing users to scrape up to 200 pages of data in just 40 minutes! ParseHub is also nice in that it provides desktop clients for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, so you can use them from your computer no matter what system you’re running.

5. Scrapy

Website: https://scrapy.org

Who this is for: Scrapy is an open source web scraping library for Python developers looking to build scalable web crawlers. It’s a comprehensive web crawling framework that handles all of the plumbing (queueing requests, proxy middleware, etc.) that makes building web crawlers difficult.

Why you should use it: As an open source tool, Scrapy is completely free. It is battle-tested, and has been one of the most popular Python libraries for years. It’s lauded as the best python web scraping tool for new applications. There is a learning curve, but it’s well-documented and there are numerous tutorials available to help you get started. In addition, deploying the crawlers is very simple and reliable, the processes can run themselves once they are set up. As a fully featured web scraping framework, there are many middleware modules available to integrate various tools and handle various use cases (handling cookies, user agents, etc.).

6. Diffbot

Website: https://www.diffbot.com

Who this is for: Diffbot is an enterprise-level solution for companies who have highly specified data crawling and screen scraping needs, particularly those who scrape websites that often change their HTML structure.

Why you should use it: Diffbot is different from most web page scraping tools out there in that it uses computer vision (instead of html parsing) to identify relevant information on a page. This means that even if the HTML structure of a page changes, your web scrapers will not break as long as the page looks the same visually. This is an incredible feature for long-running mission critical web scraping jobs. Diffbot is pricey (the cheapest plan is $299/month), but they do a great job offering a premium service that may make it worth it for large customers.

7. Cheerio

Website: https://cheerio.js.org

Who this is for: NodeJS developers who want a straightforward way to parse HTML. Those familiar with jQuery will immediately appreciate the best JavaScript web scraping syntax available.

Why you should use it: Cheerio offers an API similar to jQuery, so developers familiar with jQuery will immediately feel at home using Cheerio to parse HTML. It is blazing fast, and offers many helpful methods to extract text, html, classes, ids, and more. It is by far the most popular HTML parsing library written in NodeJS, and is probably the best NodeJS web scraping tool or JavaScript web scraping tool for new projects.

8. BeautifulSoup

Website: https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/

Who this is for: Python developers who just want an easy interface to parse HTML, and don’t necessarily need the power and complexity that comes with Scrapy.

Why you should use it: Like Cheerio for NodeJS developers, BeautifulSoup is by far the most popular HTML parser for Python developers. It’s been around for over a decade now and is extremely well documented, with many web parsing tutorials teaching developers to use it to scrape various websites in both Python 2 and Python 3. If you are looking for a Python HTML parsing library, this is the one you want.

9. Puppeteer

Website: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer

Who this is for: Puppeteer is a headless Chrome API for NodeJS developers who want very granular control over their scraping activity.

Why you should use it: As an open source tool, Puppeteer is completely free. It is well-supported and actively being developed and backed by the Google Chrome team. It is quickly replacing Selenium and PhantomJS as the default headless browser automation tool. It has a well-considered API, and automatically installs a compatible Chromium binary as part of its setup process, so you don’t have to keep track of browser versions yourself.

While it’s much more than just a web crawling library, it’s often used to scrape website data from sites that require JavaScript to display information. It handles scripts, stylesheets, and fonts just like a real browser. While it is a great solution for sites that require JavaScript to display data, it is also very CPU- and memory-intensive, so using it for sites where a full-blown browser is not necessary is not a great idea. Most of the time a simple GET request should do the trick!

10. Mozenda

Website: https://www.mozenda.com/

Who this is for: Enterprises looking for a cloud-based, self-serve webpage scraping platform need look no further. With over 7 billion pages scraped, Mozenda has experience in serving enterprise customers from all around the world.

Why you should use it: Mozenda set themselves apart with their customer service (providing both phone and email support to all paying customers). The platform is highly scalable and will allow for on-premise hosting as well. Like Diffbot, they are a bit pricey, with their lowest plan starting at $250/month.

11. ScrapeHero Cloud

Website: https://www.scrapehero.com/marketplace/

Who this is for: ScrapeHero is cloud-based and user-friendly, which makes it ideal if you’re not a programmer. You’ll just need to provide the inputs, click ‘gather data’ and you’ve got actionable data in JSON, CSV or Excel formats.

Why you should use it: ScrapeHero has created a browser-based, automated scraping tool that lets you download anything you want on the Internet into spreadsheets with just a few clicks. It’s more affordable than their full services, and there’s a free trial. It uses pre-built crawlers with auto rotating proxies. Real-time APIs scrape data from some of the largest online retailers and services, including maps, product pricing, the latest news and more. This data as a service tool is perfect for businesses, especially those interested in AI.

12. Webscraper.io

Website: https://webscraper.io/

Who this is for: Another user-friendly option for non-developers, WebScraper.io is a simple Google Chrome browser extension. It’s not as full-featured as the other web scraping tools on this list, but it’s an ideal user-friendly option for those who are working with smaller amounts of data that don’t need a lot of automation.

Why you should use it: WebScraper.io helps users set up a sitemap on navigating a given website and exactly what information it will scrape. The additional plugin can handle multiple JS and Ajax pages at a time, and developers can build their own scrapers that will extract data directly into CVS from the browser, or to CVS, XLSX and JSON from Web Scraper’s cloud. You can also schedule regular scrapes with regular IP rotation. The browser extension is free, but you can give their paid services a try with a free trial.

Honorable Mention 1. Kimura

Website: https://github.com/vifreefly/kimuraframework

Who this is for: Kimura is an open source web scraping framework written in Ruby, making it incredibly easy to get a Ruby web scraper up and running.

Why you should use it: Kimura is quickly becoming recognized as the best Ruby web scraping library, as it’s designed to work with headless Chrome/Firefox, PhantomJS, and normal GET requests all out of the box. It’s syntax is similar to Scrapy and developers writing Ruby web scrapers will love all of the nice configuration options to do things like set a delay, rotate user agents, and set default headers.

Honorable Mention 2. Goutte

Website: https://github.com/FriendsOfPHP/Goutte

Who this is for: Goutte is an open source web crawling framework written in PHP, making it super useful for developers looking to extract data from HTML/XML responses using PHP.

Why you should use it: Goutte is a very straight forward, no frills framework that is considered by many to be the best PHP web scraping library, as it’s designed for simplicity, handling the vast majority of HTML/XML use cases without too much additional cruft. It also seamlessly integrates with the excellent Guzzle requests library, which allows you to customize the framework for more advanced use cases.

So, what is the best web scraping tool?

The open web is by far the greatest global repository for human knowledge, and there is almost no information that you can’t find through extracting web data. Because web scraping is done by many people of various levels of technical ability and know how, there are many tools available. There are web data scraping tools that service everyone from people who don’t want to write any code, to seasoned developers just looking for the best open source solution in their language of choice. As such, there isn’t one single best web scraping tool- it all depends on your needs. Hopefully though, this list of scraping tools has helped you identify the best web data scraping tools and services for your own specific projects or businesses.