The World’s Best Web Scraping Software, Tools & APIs
Automated large-scale data extraction from websites is known as web scraping. Web scraping or web crawling techniques are being used more frequently to gather data from the internet and gain insights for personal or professional use as every industry in the world becomes dependent on data.
You can download structured data in CSV, Excel, or XML formats using web scraping tools and software, saving time compared to manually copying and pasting this data. In this article, we’ll look at some of the best web scraping tools and programs, both free and paid.
What is Web Scraping?
People and businesses who want to use the huge quantity of publicly available web data to make better decisions typically use web data extraction (web scraping).
If you’ve ever manually copied and pasted content from a website, you’ve already performed the same task as a web scraper. Web scraping uses intelligent automation to gather hundreds, millions, or even billions of data points from the internet’s seemingly limitless frontier, as opposed to the tedious, mindless process of manually extracting data.
RECOMMENDATION 👍
Our top recommendation is Hexomatic. It’s entirely “GUI” based. They have premade recipes. You don’t need to know any code to use it. You can “scrape” websites by clicking on things. Check it out and see if it’s right for you!
Hexomatic
Web scraping and workflow automation simplified Using easy, no-code automation, we’ve helped over 50,000 organizations scale. Hexomatic lets you use the internet as your own data source to automate 100+ sales, marketing, and research jobs.
And check this out…
They have a constantly growing library of pre-built “scraping recipes” for popular sites:
And on top of that – they have automations – which aren’t even really SCRAPING, but it comes with the tool.
Cant beat that! Here’s a sneak peek at some:
Create your own web scraping recipes to extract data from any website and convert it to a spreadsheet or JSON API. With a simple point-and-click interface, Hexomatic makes it simple to scrape products, directories, prospects, and listings at scale.
There’s no need for coding or complicated software.
Automations that are ready to use to do tasks on autopilot: Find new prospects in any industry, uncover email or social media accounts, translate material, supplement your leads with tech stack data, and more.
As of writing this, there are like 100 of these things. Here’s a complete list:
AI Audio transcription
With Hexomatic, you can transcribe hours of audio in minutes from a wide range of languages.
AI Document OCR
Detect and extract texts from documents via Google Vision AI.
AI Image OCR
Extract texts from images via Google Vision AI.
AI Sentiment analysis
Evaluate financial headlines, scraped content, product reviews, and user-generated content on autopilot with our Sentiment analysis automation
AI Text to speech
Perform text to speech conversion via Google Text-to-Speech
AI image labeling
Extract image labels via Google Vision AI
AI image safety
Perform image safety checks via Google Vision AI
AI logo detection
Discover product logos within an image via Google Vision AI
Accessibility audit
Check any page compliance with accessibility standards
Amazon product data
Get detailed product page information for any Amazon product listing
Amazon product reviews
Extract Amazon product reviews at scale with Hexomatic
Amazon product search
Perform product searches on Amazon
Amazon seller finder
Perform Amazon searches and get information about the sellers
Article scraper
Extract news article description, keywords and summary
Baidu search
Perform Baidu searches and get SERP results
Bing search
Perform Bing searches and get SERP data
Content analysis
Get the word count of any page
Crawler
Crawl any website extracting pages, source URLs, and links (internal and external)
Crop images
Eliminate hours of tedious image editing work with our crop images automation.
Cryptocurrency converter
Convert between cryptocurrencies
Currency converter
Convert between currencies
Data input
Provide your workflow with a text or file-based input
Date transformation
Change date from one format to another
DeepL Translate
Perform an advanced machine translation via DeepL
Discord
Get notifications in Discord
Discover Tech Stack
Discover the tech stack used on any page
Discover WHOIS
Discover WHOIS details for any given domain name
Discover profile
Discover contact details and social media profiles.
Email Address Validation
Discover validity of an email address
Email Verification (EasyDMARC)
Advanced email validation and verification powered by EasyDMARC
Email discovery
Discover email addresses found on the website or referenced on the internet
Emails scraper
Extract email addresses from any URL
Extract domain from URL and Email address
Extract root domains from any URL and Email address
Extract links from a page
Extract all the links found on a page
Files & Documents finder
Automatically find and extract files or documents from a page
Files compressor
Combine several files into a single zipped folder
Filter data by criteria
Dynamically filter data by criteria
Find & Replace or Remove
Dynamically append, prepend, replace or remove data from a spreadsheet
Get page content
Get the visible text contained on any page
Google BigQuery
Discover and access unique and valuable datasets from Google, public, or commercial providers
Google Drive (Export / Sync)
Export or sync your data to Google Drive
Google Maps
Perform Google Maps searches and get SERP results
Google News
Perform Google News searches and get SERP results
Google Search
Perform Google searches and get SERP data
Google Sheets (Export / Sync)
Export or sync your data to Google Sheets
Google Sheets Import
Use Google Sheets as an input for your workflow
Google Translate
Perform a translation via Google Translate
Google image search
Perform Google image searches and get SERP data
Google seller
Get competing merchant data for any product ID
Google shopping automation
Perform Google shopping searches and get SERP data
Grammar & spelling audit
Detects grammar and spelling mistakes
HTML grabber
Get HTML source code of the page
Hexospark integration
Send leads automatically from Hexomatic workflows to your Hexospark CRM and campaigns.
Image converter
Convert images from one format to another
Integrately
Send data from your workflow to 1000’s of compatible apps
Keyword finder
Check the page for a keyword
KonnectzIT
Send data from your workflow to 100’s of compatible apps
Logo and favicon finder
Automatically extract the favicon and logo from any URL
Make, formerly Integromat integration
Send your Hexomatic data to 1000s of compatible apps integrated inside the Make ecosystem
Malicious URL checker
Scan any page for malicious or unsafe URLs
Mathematical operations
Perform basic arithmetic operations
Measurement units converter
Convert one measurement unit to another
Microsoft Teams integration
Send notifications from your Hexomatic workflow via Microsoft teams
Mobile Friendly Checker
Test any website page for any usability or responsive design issues on mobile devices using our mobile friendly checker.
Numbers transformation
Change numbers from one format to another
Pabbly Connect
Send data from your workflow to 100’s of compatible apps
Phone number scraper
Extract phone numbers from pages
Pull contacts
Pull contact information found on the page
QR code generator
Create QR codes with our Hexomatic QR code generator.
RSS feed extractor
Returns structured summary of a RSS feed
Redirect extractor
Discover the number of redirects and the final destination URL
Regex
Extract information from any text by searching for a specific search pattern
Remove duplicates from spreadsheet
Remove duplicates from the spreadsheet
Rename file
Bulk rename files using any data field from your workflow.
Resize and compress images
Handle image resizing and compressing at scale at high fidelity with Hexomatic.
SEO backlink explorer
Find pages linking to any domain or a webpage
SEO backlink intelligence
Get top level off-page SEO metrics for any page or domain
SEO meta tags
Extract meta tags from any given URL
SEO referring domains
Find referring domains linking to any domain or webpage
SQL database connector
Use any SQL database as a data input for your workflow
Schema scraper
Extract the schema structured data of any page
Screenshot capture
Capture a full web page screenshot from a URL
Sitemap extractor
Extract all URLs from the sitemap
Slack
Get notifications in Slack
Social links scraper
Extract social media profile links from any URL
Structured data converter
Converts files into structured data formats
Telegram
Get notifications in Telegram
Text transformation
Change text from one format to another
Traffic Insights
Get traffic insights for any domain
Tripadvisor Search
Get data on Tripadvisor listings
Trustpilot Search
Get data on businesses listed on Trustpilot, including reviews and company details
Twitter profile data
Get up-to-date details on Twitter users
URL status checker
Check the status of any URL
Video links extractor
Detects and extracts video links found on the page
Visualization by Google Data Studio
Convert data into informative graphical reports
Webhooks
Send data to any application via webhooks
Website Categorization
Categorize any website based on its URL instantly.
WordPress media upload
Upload media files to WordPress in bulk, including images and other media, on autopilot. Ideal for uploading scraped images with titles and descriptions.
WordPress post
Create posts in WordPress at scale with our Hexomatic WordPress automation
XML sitemap generator
Generate one XML sitemap from all inputted URLs
YELP
Perform YELP directory searches
Yahoo search
Perform Yahoo searches and get SERP results
Zapier Integration
Send data from your workflow to 1000’s of compatible apps
Hexomatic also has a ton of tool integrations:
And a killer “training” / “tutorials” section – here’s a few:
Pretty awesome right??
Apify
Apify is a Node.js library similar to Scrapy that markets itself as a general-purpose JavaScript web scraping library with support for Puppeteer, Cheerio, and other tools.
You can start with a number of URLs and recursively follow links to other pages using its special features like RequestQueue and AutoscaledPool, and you can execute scraping tasks at the system’s maximum capacity by doing so. Its supported data formats include JSON, JSONL, CSV, XML, XLSX, HTML, and supported CSS selectors. It has built-in support for Puppeteer and supports all website types.
Node.js 8 or later is required for the Apify SDK.
Octoparse
Octoparse is a simple-to-use visual website scraping tool. You can quickly select the fields you need to scrape from a website thanks to its point-and-click interface. With AJAX, JavaScript, cookies, and other technologies,
Octoparse can manage both static and dynamic websites. The application also provides cutting-edge cloud services that let you extract significant amounts of data.
The scraped data can be exported in TXT, CSV, HTML, or XLSX formats.
The free version of Octoparse lets you create up to 10 crawlers, but the paid subscription plans give you access to additional features like an API and numerous anonymous IP proxies that will speed up data extraction and allow you to fetch sizable amounts of data in real time.Web Scraper (Chrome Extension)
A free and simple tool for extracting data from web pages is Web Scraper, a standalone Chrome extension. You can create and test a sitemap using the extension to determine how the website should be navigated and what data should be extracted.
You can easily navigate the website however you want with the sitemaps, and the data can be exported as a CSV at a later time.
Scrapy
Scrapy is a great tool for web scraping, but what makes it even easier is that there is an Apify recipe already made on top of Scrapy – saving you the time to setup all the boring stuff!
Web scrapers are created using the open-source Python web scraping framework known as Scrapy. It provides you with all the resources necessary to effectively extract information from websites, process it, and store it in the structure and format of your choice.
Its foundation of a Twisted asynchronous networking framework is one of its main advantages. Use this data scraping tool if you have a sizable data scraping project and want to maximize its effectiveness with respect to flexibility.
Data can be exported in the formats JSON, CSV, and XML. Scrapy stands out for its simplicity of use, thorough documentation, and vibrant community. It works on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux operating systems.
ScrapeHero Cloud
A platform for web scraping using a browser is called ScrapeHero Cloud. For the purpose of scraping data from websites like Amazon, Google, Walmart, and others, ScrapeHero has developed pre-built crawlers and APIs that are inexpensive and simple to use.
Before purchasing a plan, you can test the scraper’s performance and dependability with the free trial version.
You DO NOT need to download any data scraping software or tools and spend time learning how to use them in order to use ScrapeHero Cloud. Any browser can use this web scraper because it is browser-based.
Data Scraper (Chrome Extension)
An intuitive and cost-free web scraping tool called Data Scraper can extract data from a single page and save it as CSV and XSL data files. It is a customized browser extension that facilitates the conversion of data into a tidy table format.
The plugin must be set up in a Google Chrome browser. You can only scrape 500 pages per month using the free version; to scrape more pages, you must upgrade to a paid plan.
Scraper (Chrome Extension)
A Chrome extension called Scraper is used to scrape basic web pages. It is a simple-to-use, free web scraping tool that enables you to download the content of websites into Google Docs or Excel spreadsheets.
It has the ability to extract data from tables and transform it into a structured format.
ParseHub
A web-based data scraping tool called ParseHub is designed to crawl both single- and multi-website environments and supports JavaScript, AJAX, cookies, sessions, and redirects.
The program can gather and analyze data from websites and turn it into useful information. It recognizes even the most complex documents using machine learning technology and creates the output file in JSON, CSV, Google Sheets, or via API.
Users of Windows, Mac, and Linux can download the desktop application Parsehub, which functions as a Firefox extension. The web app is simple to use, can be integrated into the browser, and has clear documentation.
It has all the modern features, including navigation, pop-up windows, endless scrolling pages, and pagination. The data from ParseHub can even be visualized in Tableau.
Five projects with 200 pages each are the maximum allowed in the free version. You can get 20 private projects with 10,000 pages per crawl and IP rotation if you purchase a paid Parsehub subscription.
OutWitHub
A data extractor included in a web browser is called OutwitHub. You must download the program from the Firefox Add-ons store in order to use it as an extension. To use the data scraping tool, simply follow the on-screen directions and launch the program.
Without any programming knowledge, OutwitHub can assist you in extracting data from the web. It works well for gathering data that may not be readily available.
If you need to quickly scrape some data from the web, OutwitHub, a free web scraping tool, is a great choice. It performs extraction tasks while automatically browsing a set of web pages thanks to its automation features.
Data can be exported from the data scraping tool in a variety of formats (JSON, XLSX, SQL, HTML, CSV, etc.).
Visual Web Ripper
Another website scraping tool that uses automatic data collection is called Visual Web Ripper. Data structures from pages or search results are collected by the tool. The user interface is friendly, and you can export data to Excel, XML, and CSV files.
Additionally, it is capable of extracting data from AJAX-enabled dynamic websites. Only a few templates need to be configured; the web scraper will handle the rest.
There are scheduling options with Visual Web Ripper, and it even sends you an email when a project fails.
Import.io
You can clean, transform, and visualize web data using Import.io. The point-and-click interface of Import.io makes it easy to create scrapers.
The majority of the data extraction can be handled automatically. Data can be exported in Excel, JSON, and CSV formats.
Import.io offers thorough tutorials on its website to make it simple for you to begin working on your data scraping projects. Import.io insights will visualize the data in charts and graphs if you want a more in-depth analysis of the extracted data.
Diffbot
You can set up crawlers in the Diffbot application to index websites and then process them using its automatic APIs for automatically extracting data from various web content.
If the websites you need don’t support automatic data extraction API, you can also create a custom extractor. Data can be exported in Excel, JSON, and CSV formats.
Web Scraper (Chrome Extension)
A free and simple tool for extracting data from web pages is Web Scraper, a standalone Chrome extension. You can create and test a sitemap using the extension to determine how the website should be navigated and what data should be extracted.
You can easily navigate the website however you want with the sitemaps, and the data can be exported as a CSV at a later time.
FMiner
FMiner is a tool for visually extracting web data from websites and web screens. You can quickly use the software’s potent data mining engine to extract information from websites thanks to its user-friendly interface.
It also processes AJAX/Javascript, solves CAPTCHAs, and has basic web scraping features. It operates on both Windows and Mac OS and uses the built-in browser for scraping.
It has a 15-day free trial period before you can choose whether to use the paid subscription.
Dexi.io
No download is necessary for Dexi (previously known as CloudScrape), which supports data extraction from any website. The software application offers a variety of robots, including crawlers, extractors, autobots, and pipes, to scrape data.
The most sophisticated robots are extractors because you can select every action the robot should take, including extracting screenshots and clicking buttons.
To conceal your identity, this data scraping tool provides anonymous proxies. Dexi.io also provides a variety of service integrations with outside providers. You can export the data in JSON or CSV formats or download it directly to Google Drive and Box.net.
Your data is kept on Dexi.io’s servers for two weeks before being archived. You can always upgrade to the paid version if you need to scrape more frequently.
Web Harvey
With the help of the built-in browser in WebHarvey’s visual web scraper, you can collect data from websites. The interface is point-and-click, which makes choosing elements simple. The benefit of using this scraper is that no programming is required. CSV, JSON, and XML files can be used to save the data.
It can be kept in a SQL database as well. A multi-level category scraping feature in WebHarvey can collect data from listing pages by following links to each level of a category.
You can use regular expressions with the website scraping tool, giving you more flexibility. By hiding your IP address, proxy servers can be set up to help you remain somewhat anonymous while collecting data from websites.
PySpider
Python-based PySpider is a web crawler. It has a distributed architecture and is compatible with Javascript pages. You can have numerous crawlers in this manner. The data can be stored by PySpider on any backend of your choice, including MongoDB, MySQL, Redis, etc. As message queues, you can use Redis, Beanstalk, and RabbitMQ.
One benefit of PySpider is the user-friendly interface where you can edit scripts, keep track of ongoing tasks, and see results. JSON and CSV formats are available for saving the data. The Internet scrape to take into consideration if you’re working with a website-based user interface is PySpider. It also supports websites with a lot of AJAX.
Content Grabber
A visual web scraping tool with a simple point-and-click interface is called Content Grabber. Its user interface supports infinite scrolling pages, pop-up windows, and pagination.
Additionally, it supports regular expressions, has AJAX/Javascript processing, a captcha solution, and IP rotation (using Nohodo). Data can be exported in the formats CSV, XLSX, JSON, and PDF. This tool requires intermediate programming knowledge to use.
Mozenda
A platform for commercial cloud-based web scraping is called Mozenda. It has an intuitive user interface (UI) and a point-to-click interface. It consists of two components: an application for creating the data extraction project and a web console for managing results, running agents, and exporting data.
Additionally, they offer API access for data retrieval and include built-in storage integrations for FTP, Amazon S3, Dropbox, and other services.
Data can be exported as CSV, XML, JSON, or XLSX files. Mozenda excels at managing massive amounts of data. This tool has a steep learning curve, so you will need more than just basic coding knowledge to use it.
Kimura
A web scraping framework called Kimura is used to create scrapers and extract data from the web. We can scrape and interact with websites that are rendered in JavaScript using Headless Chromium/Firefox, PhantomJS, or basic HTTP requests, which it supports out of the box.
It has configuration options like setting a delay, switching user agents, and setting default headers. Its syntax is comparable to Scrapy’s.
Additionally, it interacts with websites using the Capybara testing framework.
Cheerio
Cheerio is a library that decodes HTML and XML files and lets you work with the downloaded data using the jQuery syntax. Cheerio API is a quick choice for efficient rendering, manipulation, and parsing if you’re writing a web scraper in JavaScript.
None of the following things are done by it: it does not interpret the result as a web browser, create a visual rendering, use CSS, load external resources, or run JavaScript. Projects like PhantomJS or JSDom should be taken into consideration if you need any of these features.
NodeCrawler
A well-liked web crawler for NodeJS, Nodecrawler provides a very quick crawling solution. Nodecrawler is the best web crawler to use if you prefer to code in JavaScript or if the majority of your work involves JavaScript. Its installation is also fairly easy.
Puppeteer
A Node library called Puppeteer offers a robust but user-friendly API that lets you manage Google’s headless Chrome browser. A headless browser lacks a graphical user interface (GUI), but it can send and receive requests.
It operates in the background and carries out tasks as directed by an API. By typing where they type and clicking where they click, you can mimic the user experience.
Puppeteer works best for web scraping when the data you need is produced by a combination of API data and Javascript code. Puppeteer can also be used to capture screenshots of web pages that are automatically displayed when a web browser is launched.
Playwright
Microsoft developed the Node library called Playwright specifically for automating browsers. It makes cross-browser web automation efficient, dependable, and quickly possible.
Playwright was developed to enhance automated UI testing by removing flakiness, enhancing execution speed, and providing insights into browser functionality. It is a more recent tool for automating browsers and shares many characteristics with Puppeteer.
It also comes pre-bundled with compatible browsers. Its greatest strength is cross-browser compatibility; it can power Firefox, WebKit, and Chrome. Playwright has continuous integrations with Travis CI, AppVeyor, Azure, Docker, and Travis CI.
PJscrape
A web scraping framework called PJscrape was created in Python using Javascript and JQuery.
It is designed to run with PhantomJS, enabling you to scrape pages from the command line in a fully rendered, Javascript-enabled context without the need for a browser.
The full browser context is used to evaluate the scraper functions. This implies that in addition to having access to the DOM, Javascript variables and functions, AJAX-loaded content, etc. are also accessible.
How to choose a web scraping tool
If the amount of data needed is small and the source websites are straightforward, web scraping tools, both free and paid, and self-service software/applications may be a good option.
Web scraping tools and software are not scalable when there are a lot of websites to scrape, have complex logic, or need to bypass a CAPTCHA.
A full-service provider is a more advantageous and cost-effective choice in such circumstances.
These web scraping tools easily extract data from web pages, but they have their limitations. In the long run, programming is the most effective method for web data scraping because it offers more flexibility and produces better outcomes.
There are excellent web scraping services that will suit your needs and make the job simpler for you if you lack programming skills, have complex requirements, or need a lot of data to be scraped.
By using this guide instead—you’ll learn what is required to use any of the tools mentioned and they will only provide clean data to you—you can save time and obtain clean, structured data.
Final Thoughts
Data is the new oil, but not everyone can take advantage of its value without a useful tool. Whether or not a person can code, data scraping tools are working to make data more accessible to everyone. By doing this, everyone can access the necessary data and use it to analyze it to produce value for the world.