Top 15 Web Crawling Tools to Scrape Websites

Web crawling is defined as the process of finding or discovering the URLs and links over the internet. Search engine optimization is a type of finding process in which the search engines send a team of robots which are known as spiders or crawlers to find the updated content. Therefore this article aims to provide detailed knowledge about the Top 15 web crawling tools to scrape websites.

Whether you’re a business analyst looking for market insights or a developer in need of website data, web scraping tools can be your key to the data available on the internet. Web crawling is the process of systematically and automatically extracting data from different websites. From e-commerce prices and social media trends to news articles and product reviews, the applications of web scraping are limitless.

What is Web Crawling?

A web crawler or a web spider systematically browses the web pages over the internet. It is a type of computer program that is used to search and automatically index website content over the internet. Therefore, web crawling refers to the process of discovering the links or URLs on the web. Web crawling plays an important part in businesses ranking their website on the web so that users can find it easily.

But some people think web scraping and web crawling as the same, so let’s look at the Difference Between Web scraping and Web crawling

Web Scraping	Web Crawling
The tool which is used in web scraping is web scraper.	The tool which is used in web crawling is a web crawler or web spider.
Web scraping is used for downloading the information from the website.	Web crawling is used for indexing the web pages.
It can be done on both large and small scales.	It can only be done on large scales.
It doesn’t visit all the pages of the website.	It does visit all the pages on the website.
Web scraping application areas consist of machine learning, retail marketing, and equity search.	Web crawling is used in search engines to provide search results to the user.
Example- Scraper.io	Example- Google, Bing, or Yahoo.

To learn more refer to this article: Web Crawling Vs. Web Scraping

Top 15 web crawling tools to scrape websites

Web crawling is an emerging domain that uses the existing data available on the internet to extract information and help the business by providing insights. To learn Web crawling, you can use these top 15 Web Crawling tools to Scrape websites and make some cool projects.

1. Bright Data

Bright Data Web Scraper is designed for developers and consists of ready-made web scraper templates that help to focus on multi-step data collection from the browser.

To learn more, refer to this article: Bright Data

Features:

• It is a fully hosted IDE which is built on unblocking proxy infrastructure.
• They are also used in browsers for javascript rendering, CAPTCHA solving, fingerprinting, cookies, automatic retries and selecting headers.

Pricing: Bright Data paid plans starts from $500/month.

2. Oxylabs Scraper API

It is designed to collect large volumes of real-time public data from any web page. It helps in providing market research, SEO monitoring, fraud protection, and so on. They provide structured and valuable data to the people and also eliminate the requirement of individual research.

Features:

• It is a trustworthy solution for quick data extraction.
• It is also used in javascript rendering and recurring job scheduling.

Pricing: There are both free and paid plans available. Paid plan starting at $49/month.

3. Apify

Apify is the most powerful no-code, open-source proxy management web scraping and automation tool which is used for data extraction from social media, mobile apps, web pages, and e-commerce pages, from the API’s.

Features:

• They let the developers automate the manual workflows that are done on the web.
• It is also used to import and export extraction features, images, and documents.

Pricing: It is free but the personal plan starts from $49.

4. Smartproxy

Smartproxy consists of many scraping APIs that are used in e-commerce, social media, and web scraping. They provide client access to any number of exit nodes therefore the users are unlikely to lose access to the required data which they need.

Features:

• They are the combined proxies, sometimes data parsers and web scrapers.
• This is a no-code scraper that allows the user to collect data without writing any code and also provides proxy network covers in 195+ places.

Pricing: The paid plan of Smartproxy starts from $50/month.

5. ParseHub

ParseHub is a powerful scraping tool that is used for the extraction of online data and is also used to scrape and download images in JSON and CSV files. Parsehub has more useful features than the other scraping tools. They get the data from the tables and maps.

Features:

• It is an automatic cloud-based tool for storing data.
• Parsehub is a machine learning technology that can read, analyze, and transform web documents into useful data.
• It could easily be used by data analysts to data scientists. Parsehub provides desktop clients for Windows, Mac, Linux, and OS devices.

Pricing: In parsehub it has both free and paid plans available. Paid plans start from $149/month.

6. Scrape. do

Scrape.do is a web scraping tool that is used to provide fast and scalar web scraper API in an endpoint. They used rotating proxies which allowed them to scrape any websites to extract the data. They are also the super proxy parameter which allows to extract data with protection.They allows the website pages to render javascript.

Features:

• They provide a service that allows access to the raw data before the target website understands that it is sending bot traffic bypassing the blocking problems which are experienced while scraping the target website.
• It is one of the most cost-effective scraping tools.

Pricing : In Scrape.do the price plans start from $29/month and the pro plan starts from $99/month.

7. Octoparse

Octoparse is known as the best web crawler which is a client based tool used to get the data into the spreadsheets. It is built for non coders. They have a site parser solution for the users who want to run scarpers in the cloud. There are two types of operation mode in Octoparse such as Wizard mode and advanced mode.

Features:

• The point and click interface guides the user for the extraction of the data.
• The website content can be easily accessed and saved into the structured formats like HTML, TXT, Excel and so on.

Pricing: There are both free and paid plans available. Paid plans start from $75/month.

8. Scrapy

Scrapy is an open source free of cost web scraping library, therefore it is a complete web crawling framework which is used by the python developers. Scrapy helps to handle the functions which are used to build web crawlers. They are used for data mining and automated testing

Features:

• Scrapy uses the spiders which defines how the sites should be scrapped for the required data.
• It is easily extensible and well documented. Their deployment is fast and reliable.

Pricing: Scrapy is completely free of cost.

9. Mozenda

Mozenda is a high scalable cloud based self serve web scraping platform which boasts the enterprise of customers all over the world. This tool allows the users to view the report and run it where the data has been collected. It automatically detects the information organised in lists on the website pages and also allows the user to build agents which collect this data.

Features:

• They offer point and click interface to create scraping events in time and also allows on premise hoisting.
• They give both email and phone support to their customers.

Pricing: The paid plans in Mozenda start from $99.

10. Scraper API

Scraper API is used for handling the web browsers, CAPTCHAs and proxies. It is designed by designers to make web scraping at scale as simple as it can be by rotating proxy pools, solving the CAPTCHAs, detecting bans and managing geotargeting.

Features:

• In scraper API the raw HTML from other websites can be obtained from the API call.
• It helps to render javascript and they have good speed to build web scrapers which are scalable.

Pricing: The paid plans in Scraper API starts from $29/month.

11. Webhose.io

Webhose.io is an easy to use APIs which provides full control for the source selection and languages. It creates datasets which are based on a certain set of the keywords which further filter the data according to the important structure from the feeds. It allows access to the historical feeds and gets structured datasets in XML and JSON formats and a massive repository of the data feeds without even paying extra fees.

Features:

• Webhose.io interface designs allows it to perform the tasks in an easy and reliable way.
• It also conducts the financial analysis which can be moved beyond the current stock trends.

Pricing: There are both free and paid plans available in webhose.io.

12. Content Grabber

In Content grabber the web extraction is faster than most of the web scraping tools. It is a cloud based web scraping tool. By using the APIs it allows the user to build the web apps which executes the website data directly from the websites. It helps large as well as small sizes businesses with the data extraction which they need for the growth of their businesses.

Features:

• It is a point and click software which gives a scalable solution to collect the data from other websites.
• It can also be scheduled so that the information can be automatically scraped from the websites.

Pricing: Content Grabber paid plans start from $69/month.

13. Common Crawl

Common crawl is a non-profit organisation which provides an open repository of web crawl data which is free of cost to everyone who wants to access it. It was developed so that anyone who wants to explore or analyse the data can use it freely.

Features:

• It provides resources to the educators who are teaching data analysis.
• They use open data sets from the raw web pages and text extraction.

Pricing: Common Crawl is completely free of cost.

14. Scraping Bee

Scraping Bee is a software company which offers web scraping APIs which handles the headless browsers and rotate proxies for us. This tool is designed in large and small companies. Scraping Bee renders the web pages like a real browser which manages headless instances using chrome.

Features:

• It is user-friendly, supports java library files and uses javascript to scrape data from the web pages.
• As it is an open source and with proxies providers data extraction becomes easy and reliable.

Pricing: The paid plans start from $29/month.

15. Scrape-It.cloud

Scrape-It. Cloud is an API for web scraping which is designed for the developers to easily collect the data from the website which helps to solve scraping tasks. It handles the complexities of browser interactions, proxy management, IP blocking geotargeting and solving CAPTCHA which means that the raw HTML from any website can be obtained through the API call.

Features:

• It supports the SPAs with javascript rendering.
• Scrape-It.cloud is used by the data analyst, developer and data scientist to extract the data from the APIs.

Pricing: These are various plans available in Scrape-It.cloud starts from $30/month to $200/month.

Conclusion

Therefore, these are the Top 15 web crawling tools to scrape websites. The features and uses of each scraping tool have been mentioned in the article. Some of the above scraping tools require technical knowledge while others can be used without writing a single line of code. These tools are used to save time and for news monitoring, to extract contact information, to track prices from many markets and for many other purposes.