Which Are The Best Web Scraping Tools You Can Use in 2021?
If you are a newcomer in this field, you may find more information about web scraping at several blogs. Web scraping (also known as web data extraction, screen scraping, or web harvesting) is a method of extracting data from websites. It converts web data scattered across pages into structured data that can be stored in a spreadsheet on your local computer or transmitted to a database. This can be difficult for people that don’t know how to code and to create a web scraper.
Luckily, web scraping software is available for people with or without programming skills. If you’re a data scientist or researcher, using a web scraper improves your data collection efficiency. A web scraper uses bots to extract structured data and content from a website by extracting the underlying HTML code and data stored in a database. In extracting data, from preventing your IP from getting banned to parsing the source website correctly, generating data in a compatible format, and to data cleaning, there is a lot of sub-process that goes in. Fortunately, web scrapers and data scraping tools make this process simple, quick, and dependable.
In this post, you will find a list of the top 5 best web scraping tools compared based on their features and ease-of-use:
Scrape.do
Scrape.do is a simple web scraper tool that offers a scalable, fast proxy web scraper API in an endpoint. Scrape.do is at the top of the list in terms of cost-effectiveness and features. Scrape.do, as you will see in the following section, is one of the most affordable web scraping tools available. Scrape.do, unlike its competitors, does not charge extra for Google and other difficult-to-scrape websites. It has the best price/performance ratio for Google scraping on the market (SERP) ($249 for 5,000,000 SERP).
Beautiful Soup
Beautiful Soup is an open-source Python library for scraping HTML and XML files from the web. It is the best Python parser that has been widely used. If you have programming skills, this library works best when combined with Python. This tool is used by developers who are skilled in programming to create a web scraper/web crawler to crawl websites.
Octoparse
Octoparse is a SaaS web data platform that is available for free for the rest of your life. With its simple interface, you can scrape web data in a subject of points and clicks. It also includes ready-to-use web scraping templates for extracting data from Amazon, eBay, Twitter, BestBuy, and other websites. Octoparse also offers web data service if you need a one-stop data solution.
Scrapingdog
Scrapingdog is a web scraping tool that simplifies the handling of proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs. In a single API call, this tool returns HTML data from any webpage. One of the best features of Scraping Dog is the availability of a LinkedIn API. Scrapingdog is for anyone who needs web scraping, from developers to non-developers. The price starts from $20/m. JS rendering feature is available for at least the standard plan which is $90/m. LinkedIn API available only for the pro plan ($200/m.)
Import.io
Import.io is a web data platform as a service. It offers a web scraping solution, allowing you to scrape data from websites and organize it into data sets. They can gain insight by integrating web data into analytic tools for sales and marketing. This tool is for enterprises with budgets looking for integration solutions on web data.
Extraction of data from websites using web scraping tools is a time-saving method, especially for those who don’t have sufficient coding knowledge. Many factors should be considered when selecting a suitable tool to facilitate web scraping, such as ease of use, API integration, cloud-based extraction, large-scale scraping, project scheduling, and etc. So, which one will you choose?
Written by Rania Salsabila
References:
Octoparse. 2021. Top 30 Free Web Scraping Software in 2021. Tersedia dalam https://www.octoparse.com/blog/top-30-free-web-scraping-software (Diakses pada 4 Oktober 2021)
Popusmart. 2021. 12 Best Web Scraping Tools in 2021 to Extract Online Data. [online]. Tersedia dalam https://popupsmart.com/blog/web-scraping-tools (Diakses pada 4 Oktober 2021)
