How to use Web Scraper? There are only a couple of steps you will need to learn in order to master web scraping: 1. Install Web Scraper and open Web Scraper tab in developer tools (which has to be placed at the bottom of the screen for Web Scraper to be visible); 2. Create a new sitemap; 3. Add data extraction selectors to the sitemap; 4. Who is this for: developers who are proficient at programming to.
Web scraping helps gather data from websites, but sometimes that information is unstructured. There are many tools or processes through which data can be extracted from complex formats, but the goal is to have the data to be able to view and understand. Data extraction tools and software significantly expedites the collection of relevant data for further analysis by automating the process, giving you more control over data sources and data management.
Data extraction tools and software applications allow you to download data into structured CSV, Excel, or XML formats and help you save time spent in manually copy-pasting this data. Data extraction tools are different from data scraping tools. While data scraping tools perform web scraping, data extraction tools can also export the data into a structured format.
In this post, we will walk through free and paid data extraction tools to help you choose the right one for your criteria.
Scrapy
Scrapy is an open source web scraping framework in Python used to build web scrapers. It gives you all the tools you need to efficiently extract data from websites, process them as you want, and store them in your preferred structure and format. One of its main advantages is that it’s built on top of a Twisted asynchronous networking framework.
Scrapy has a couple of handy built-in export formats such as JSON, XML, and CSV. Its built for extracting specific information from websites and allows you to focus on the data extraction using CSS selectors and choosing XPath expressions. Scraping web pages using Scrapy is much faster than other open source tools so its ideal for extensive large-scale scaping. It can also be used for a wide range of purposes, from data mining to monitoring and automated testing.
Available Data Formats- JSON, XML, CSV
Pros
- Detailed documentation
- Suitable for broad crawls
- Open Source
Apify SDK
Apify SDK is a Node.js library which is a lot like Scrapy positioning itself as a universal web scraping library in JavaScript, with support for Puppeteer, Cheerio, and more. It provides a simple framework for parallel crawling. It has a tool Basic Crawler which requires the user to implement the page download and data extraction. With its unique features like RequestQueue and AutoscaledPool, you can start with several URLs and then recursively follow links to other pages and can run the scraping tasks at the maximum capacity of the system respectively.
Available Data Formats – JSON, JSONL, CSV, XML, Excel or HTML
Pros
- Good for data extraction from Javascript websites
- Built-in support for Puppeteer
- Open source
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Kimurai
Kimurai is a web scraping framework in Ruby used to build scrapers and extract data. It works out of the box with Headless Chromium/Firefox, PhantomJS, or simple HTTP requests and allows us to scrape and interact with JavaScript rendered websites. Its syntax is similar to Scrapy and it has configuration options such as setting a delay, rotating user agents, and setting default headers.
Available Data Formats – JSON, JSONL, or CSV
Pros
- Good for Javascript rendered websites
- Open Source
You can find more information on web scraping frameworks, tools and software here: Free and Paid Web Scraping Tools and Open Source Web Scraping Tools
Import.io
With Import.io you can clean, transform, and visualize the data from the web. Import.io has a point to click interface to help you build a scraper. It can handle most of the data extraction automatically. You can export data into CSV, JSON, and Excel formats.
Import.io provides detailed tutorials on their website so you can easily get started with your web scraping projects. If you want a deeper analysis of the data extracted you can get Import.insights that will visualize the data in charts and graphs.
There are two plans – Community and Enterprise. The Community version is free which you can use for small scale projects. The Enterprise version is prices based on your project needs
Web Scraper
Web scraper, a standalone chrome extension, is a free and easy tool for extracting data from web pages. Using the extension you can create and test a sitemap to see how the website should be traversed and what data should be extracted. Webscraper.io can handle infinite scrolling, pagination, and AJAX websites.
With the sitemaps, you can easily navigate the site the way you want and the data can be later export. You can download the data into CSV, JSON, and XML formats.
The free version can be used with limited features. If you want the upgraded version the paid plans start at $50/month for 5K crawls with data retention, scheduling, and email support.
Data Scraper
Data Scraper is a simple data scraping tool for extracting data from web pages into CSV and XSL data files. It is a personal browser extension that helps you structure data into a clean table format. The tool contains recipes which are instruction to help you scrape data from a website. When you visit a website, Data Scraper automatically filters through recipes that users have created and shows you the appropriate one.
You will need to install the plugin in a Google Chrome browser. The free version lets you scrape 500 pages per month, if you want to scrape more pages you have to upgrade to the paid plans.
Diffbot
Visual Web Scraping Tools
Diffbot lets you configure crawlers that can go in and index websites and then process them using its automatic APIs for automatic data extraction from various web content. You can also write a custom extractor if automatic data extraction API doesn’t work for the websites you need. You can export data in CSV, JSON, and Excel formats.
Diffbot offers a 14-day free trial which will allow up to 10K page credits.
Mozenda
Mozenda is an enterprise cloud-based web-scraping platform. It has a point-to-click interface and a user-friendly UI. It has two parts – an application to build the data extraction project and a Web Console to run agents, organize results, and export data. You can export data into CSV, XML, JSON, and XLSX formats. They also provide API access to fetch data and have inbuilt storage integrations like FTP, Amazon S3, Dropbox, and more.
Mozenda is good for gathering data in large volumes. You will require more than basic coding skills to use this tool as it has a high learning curve. Mozenda provides detailed documentation and webinars to help you with your projects. They provide a 30-day free trial before buying the product.
OutwitHub
OutwitHub is a data extractor built in a web browser. The tool can help you extract unstructured data from the web with no programming skills at all. It’s great for harvesting data that might not be accessible. OutwitHub is a free tool which is a great option if you need to extract some data from the web quickly. With its automation features, it browses automatically through a series of web pages and performs extraction tasks. You can export the data into numerous formats (JSON, XLSX, SQL, HTML, CSV, etc.).
If you wish to use the software as an extension you have to download it from Firefox add-ons store. If you want to use the standalone application you just need to follow the instructions and run the application.
Dexi.io
Dexi supports data extraction from any website and requires no download. The web-based software application provides different types of robots in order to scrape data – Crawlers, Extractors, Autobots, and Pipes. Extractor robots are the most advanced as it allows you to choose every action the robot needs to perform like clicking buttons and extracting screenshots.
The application offers anonymous proxies to hide your identity. Dexi.io also offers a number of integrations with third-party services. You can download the data directly to Box.net and Google Drive or export it as JSON or CSV formats. Dexi.io stores your data on its servers for 2 weeks before archiving it. This tool is targeted towards professionals, but if you need help there are plenty of webinars and detailed documentation to go through. If you need to scrape on a larger scale you can always get the paid version.
Visual Web Ripper
Visual Web Ripper is a tool for automated data scraping. The tool collects data structures from pages or search results. It has a user-friendly interface and you can export data to CSV, XML, and Excel files. It can also extract information and data from dynamic websites including AJAX websites. You only have to configure a few templates and web scraper will figure out the rest. Visual Web Ripper provides scheduling options and you even get an email notification when a project fails. The tool also provides an open API. You can create and modify your web scraping projects and read the extracted data using the API.
The pricing starts with a one-time payment of $349 for a single user license and goes up based on the number of users.
FMiner
FMiner is a visual web data extraction tool for web scraping and web screen scraping. Its intuitive user interface permits you to quickly harness the software’s powerful data mining engine to extract data from websites. In addition to the basic web scraping features it can also handle AJAX/Javascript processing, CAPTCHA solving, and multi-layered crawls. If you need regular updated you can set up a schedule for your runs.
It can be run both on Windows and Mac OS and it does scraping using the internal browser. It has a 15-day freemium model until you can decide on using the paid subscription. The basic plan starts at $168 for Windows users and $228 for Mac users.
Automated Web Scraping Tool
Content Grabber
Content Grabber is a visual web scraping tool created by Sequenteum. It has a point-to-click interface to choose elements easily. Its interface allows pagination, infinite scrolling pages, and pop-ups. In addition, it has AJAX/Javascript processing, captcha solution, allows the use of regular expressions, and manage website logins. You can export data in CSV, XLSX, JSON, and PDF formats. Intermediate programming skills are needed to use this tool.
Content Grabber has two versions for ‘Enterprise for Desktop’ and ‘Enterprises for Server’. Its downside is that it only supports versions of Windows.
Free Web Scraping Tools
If you have greater scraping requirements or would like to scrape on a much larger scale it’s better to use enterprise web scraping services like Scrapehero. We are a full-service provider that doesn’t require the use of any tools and all you get is clean data without any hassles.
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