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• Text Scraper
• 5 Best Web Scraping Tools In 2020!
• 1. Octoparse

Data scraping is now gaining momentum as an ace method for obtaining valuable data from the boundless information space of the World Wide Web. Businesses looking to gain a competitive edge in their markets use web scraping as a fast and fuss-free way for capturing and analyzing crucial information about products, customers, and competitors. This process provides for competitive intelligence and informed business decisions.

Web scraping is used for contact scraping, and as a component of applications used for web indexing, web mining and data mining, online price change monitoring and price comparison, product review scraping, gathering real estate listings, and weather data monitoring.Web Scraping is also known as web harvesting or web data extraction. Our web scraping technology eliminates the need to write scripts or hire developers. Harvesting data is 5x faster with Mozenda.

Introducing FMiner. FMiner is a software for web scraping, web data extraction, screen scraping, web harvesting, web crawling and web macro support for windows and Mac OS X. It is an easy to use web data extraction tool that combines best-in-class features with an intuitive visual project design tool, to make your next data mining project a breeze. Online Web Scraper Discover The Most Beneficial Data Scraping Tool For Enhancing Your business Prospects Business enterprise firms are always trying to come up with new solutions to resolve the challenges that they face day to day even though operating their enterprise. Jan 07, 2020 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.

When you need to extract structured information from a huge amount of Internet sources for all kinds ofgood reasons, there are two major solutions – data scraping tools and data scraping services. But this seemingly simple dilemma can be a tricky one, since there’s a huge number of free, freemium and premium tools and services promising the best result in the shortest timeframe.

In this article we’ll walk through the main cons and pros of both data scraping bots and web scraping services to help you find out which of these solutions fits your personal or business needs.

Web Scraping Tools

The most common way of turning a website into data is to buy a data scraping tool and operate it either on your own or with professional help. The most tangible advantage of web scraping tools is that they are easy to use and enable the user to customize the way the harvested data is structured and stored.

There are hundreds of scraping tools out there with functionality and pricing varying vastly – from simple desktop applications to AI-enhanced bots with bells and whistles. Some of them even offer free trial periods so you can check if the tool fits your needs before subscribing to the paid version. You can easily download and install a tool on your own but it will probably take you some time to learn how to operate it.

If you need to harvest data to support a small-scale project with a tight budget or back up your academic research, simple web crawling bots can be the best way to go. However, they are less scalable and viable, if you are looking to conduct a comprehensive monitoring of a larger amount of information for your enterprise.

Another advantage of this method is the level of flexibility it provides. If you know what kind of data you exactly need for your research, you can “point” at the website you want to crawl and define the frequency of data extraction. Depending on your price plan, you may also be able to scrape data from sites in different languages and store it in the format of your choice.

However, it is not likely that the extracted data will immediately be ready to be used for your business needs, and this is one of the main drawbacks of web crawling tools. Most of them operate on objective-focused algorithms, simply harvesting raw data from a given website without refining the information for immediate consumption. So when going for web crawling tools you should be ready to spend some extra time and involve professionals to manage the lists of crawled information and arrange the massive dump of data. While some advanced tools provide custom extraction and parsing, these features usually imply a higher pricing model – affecting the overall cost-effectiveness of the process.

Data Scraping Services

The second option for gaining insightful data from the Internet is to rely on web scraping service providers, otherwise known asDaaS (data as a service) companies. In this case, you purchase the service which provides you with clean, accurate and structured data, relieving you of the time-drain and headache of installing and running your own extraction tool.

With web scraping services you will have less freedom to customize the structure of the extracted data, as the data will already be processed and parsed by the service provider. However, service providers likeDatahen provide flexible extraction, delivering the data in the format you like, in any frequency.

While most of the web scraping tools fail to crawl websites coded with Ajax, JavaScript, and complex programming languages, web crawling services use advanced scraping techniques to eliminate the risk of missing out the data from complex-coded web pages. Unlike most of the tools out there, web crawling services are able to extract information from websites with Captcha restrictions.

If you need to capture large chunks of information for a big project, DaaS companies offer some significant advantages over web crawling bots in terms of cost-efficiency, scalability, and a relatively short time-frame. Having your data provided by a professional service saves you precious time and enables you to concentrate on your daily tasks and business growth. Web scraping companies use advanced crawling technologies providing a full coverage of Internet sources, so you don’t need to pay for a tool upgrade to access new sources or features.

And finally, using a web scraping service saves you from being entangled in nasty legal troubles or damaging your brand reputation. While many are oblivious to this fact – some websites have issued data extraction policies to prevent the outflow of information. Unlike data scraping bots that can’t be aware of these policies, a professional data scraping service provider will ensure that no rules and policies are violated. Moreover, if any mishaps still occur due to the data extraction process, the provider will have to take responsibility for it.

These advantages make web scraping services the best solution for large-scale operations, financial analysis, brand and media monitoring and other cases which require fast access to accurate, comprehensive and well-processed data.

The Takeaway

Both web scraping tools and web scraping services come up with a number of advantages and drawbacks. While the idea of doing it on your own can be a tempting one, data scraping tools are rather limited in what they can do. Data scraping services, on the other hand, do cost you money but they are cost-effective in the long run, since they provide access to accurate and well-processed data from any source, in a relatively short time.

There are many free web scraping tools. However, not all web scraping software is for non-programmers. The lists below are the best web scraping tools without coding skills at a low cost. The freeware listed below is easy to pick up and would satisfy most scraping needs with a reasonable amount of data requirement.

Table of content

Web Scraper Client

1. Octoparse

Octoparse is a robust web scraping tool which also provides web scraping service for business owners and Enterprise. As it can be installed on both Windows and Mac OS, users can scrape data with apple devices.Web data extraction includes but not limited to social media, e-commerce, marketing, real estate listing and many others. Unlike other web scrapers that only scrape content with simple HTML structure, Octoparse can handle both static and dynamic websites with AJAX, JavaScript, cookies and etc. You can create a scraping task to extract data from a complex website such as a site that requires login and pagination. Octoparse can even deal with information that is not showing on the websites by parsing the source code. As a result, you can achieve automatic inventories tracking, price monitoring and leads generating within fingertips.

Octoparse has the Task Template Mode and Advanced Mode for users with both basic and advanced scraping skills.

• A user with basic scraping skills will take a smart move by using this brand-new feature that allows him/her to turn web pages into some structured data instantly. The Task Template Mode only takes about 6.5 seconds to pull down the data behind one page and allows you to download the data to Excel.

• The Advanced mode has more flexibility comparing the other mode. This allows users to configure and edit the workflow with more options. Advance mode is used for scraping more complex websites with a massive amount of data. With its industry-leading data fields auto-detectionfeature, Octoparse also allows you to build a crawler with ease. If you are not satisfied with the auto-generated data fields, you can always customize the scraping task to let itscrape the data for you.The cloud services enable to bulk extract huge amounts of data within a short time frame since multiple cloud servers concurrently run one task. Besides that, thecloud servicewill allow you to store and retrieve the data at any time.

2. ParseHub

Parsehub is a great web scraper that supports collecting data from websites that use AJAX technologies, JavaScript, cookies and etc. Parsehub leverages machine learning technology which is able to read, analyze and transform web documents into relevant data.

The desktop application of Parsehub supports systems such as Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, or you can use the browser extension to achieve an instant scraping. It is not fully free, but you still can set up to five scraping tasks for free. The paid subscription plan allows you to set up at least 20 private projects. There are plenty of tutorials for at Parsehub and you can get more information from the homepage.

3. Import.io

Import.io is a SaaS web data integration software. It provides a visual environment for end-users to design and customize the workflows for harvesting data. It also allows you to capture photos and PDFs into a feasible format. Besides, it covers the entire web extraction lifecycle from data extraction to analysis within one platform. And you can easily integrate into other systems as well.

Text Scraper

4. Outwit hub

Outwit hub is a Firefox extension, and it can be easily downloaded from the Firefox add-ons store. Once installed and activated, you can scrape the content from websites instantly. It has an outstanding 'Fast Scrape' features, which quickly scrapes data from a list of URLs that you feed in. Extracting data from sites using Outwit hub doesn’t demand programming skills. The scraping process is fairly easy to pick up. You can refer to our guide on using Outwit hub to get started with web scraping using the tool. It is a good alternative web scraping tool if you need to extract a light amount of information from the websites instantly.

Web Scraping Plugins/Extension

1. Data Scraper (Chrome)

Data Scraper can scrape data from tables and listing type data from a single web page. Its free plan should satisfy most simple scraping with a light amount of data. The paid plan has more features such as API and many anonymous IP proxies. You can fetch a large volume of data in real-time faster. You can scrape up to 500 pages per month, you need to upgrade to a paid plan.

2. Web scraper

Web scraper has a chrome extension and cloud extension. For chrome extension, you can create a sitemap (plan) on how a website should be navigated and what data should be scrapped. The cloud extension is can scrape a large volume of data and run multiple scraping tasks concurrently. You can export the data in CSV, or store the data into Couch DB.

3. Scraper (Chrome)

The scraper is another easy-to-use screen web scraper that can easily extract data from an online table, and upload the result to Google Docs.

Just select some text in a table or a list, right-click on the selected text and choose 'Scrape Similar' from the browser menu. Then you will get the data and extract other content by adding new columns using XPath or JQuery. This tool is intended for intermediate to advanced users who know how to write XPath.

Web-based Scraping Application

5 Best Web Scraping Tools In 2020!

1. Dexi.io (formerly known as Cloud scrape)

Dexi.io is intended for advanced users who have proficient programming skills. It has three types of robots for you to create a scraping task - Extractor, Crawler, and Pipes. It provides various tools that allow you to extract the data more precisely. With its modern feature, you will able to address the details on any websites. For people with no programming skills, you may need to take a while to get used to it before creating a web scraping robot. Check out their homepage to learn more about the knowledge base.

The freeware provides anonymous web proxy servers for web scraping. Extracted data will be hosted on Dexi.io’s servers for two weeks before archived, or you can directly export the extracted data to JSON or CSV files. It offers paid services to meet your needs for getting real-time data.

2. Webhose.io

1. Octoparse

Webhose.io enables you to get real-time data from scraping online sources from all over the world into various, clean formats. You even can scrape information on the dark web. This web scraper allows you to scrape data in many different languages using multiple filters and export scraped data in XML, JSON, and RSS formats.

The freeware offers a free subscription plan for you to make 1000 HTTP requests per month and paid subscription plans to make more HTTP requests per month to suit your web scraping needs.