Web scraping has become a very important service for the businesses and the market started to offer more and more web scraping tools which are used for extraction of data from websites. 

In this article we will look at top 10 Web scraping tools and their features and functionalities.

List of Top Web Scraping Tools 

Scrapy –

It is based on an open source and collaborative framework. This tool is widely used and works with the Python library and has some great features of web scraping. It has built in support for selection and extraction of data from HTML/XML sources, built in support for generation of feed export in various formats, robust encoding support and auto detection feature, wide range built in middleware and extensions, handles multiple requests in asynchronous manner, adjusts scraping speed using auto throttling and so on.  

ParseHub –

There is no knowledge of coding required to use this tool. Just launch the tool and let ParseHub do the job. ParseHub supports most operating systems like Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It has a browser extension to allow instant scraping, it can extract text , HTML, and attributes, scrape and download images and files, get data behind authentication (log in), infinite scrolling of web pages, search in forms and inputs, dropdowns, tabs and popups. 

OctoParse –

It is a free and powerful web scraper with several features. It allows point and click user interface to teach scrapers how to navigate and extract website fields. Ad blocking feature helps to extract data from Ad heavy pages, supports to mimic a human user on visiting and scraping data from websites, run extraction on cloud and local machine, export all types of scraped data in txt, HTML, CSV, excel formats, Regex tools and XPath helps in extraction precisely. It has built in templates including Amazon, Yelp and TripAdvisor for beginners to use. 

Import.io –

It is a web scraping tool which supports many operating systems and has a user-friendly interface and data can be stored on its cloud service. It helps to form datasets by importing the data from a specific web site and its page and exporting the data into CSV format. It allows integration of data into applications using APIs and webhooks. It is easy to use , you can schedule data extraction, store and extract data using import.io cloud, gain insights using reports, charts and other visualization techniques, automate web interaction and workflows. 

ScrapingHub –

It is a cloud-based data extraction tool which helps organizations to extract valuable data. It has four types of tools – Scrapy cloud, Portia, Crawlera and Splash. It offers a collection of IP Addresses covering more than 50 countries which handles IP ban issues. It allows storage of data in a high availability database, allows to convert entire web page into organized content, deploy crawlers and scale them on demand without need to bother about servers, monitoring or backups. It supports bot counter measures to crawl large or bot protected sites as well. 

SmartProxy – 

It has over 40 million rotating residential proxies with location targeting and flexi pricing model. It has best of breed proxies which offers rotating sessions, random residential IP addresses, Geo targeting, sticky sessions and automatic proxy rotator etc. one can use the Pay as you go basis for every GB data. 

Diffbot –

It allows you to get various types of useful data from web sites and you do not need to pay for the expense of expensive web scraping tools or doing search manually. The tool enables users to extract structured data from URLs with AI extensions. It has powerful query features and precise language, offers multiple data sources, provides support to extract structured data from any URL with AI extractors, and has a comprehensive knowledge graph.  

Mozenda –

It is delivered either as Software (SaaS or on premises) or as a managed service, which allows people to capture unstructured web data and convert into structured format and then publish and format it the way organizations want to use it. It offers cloud hosted software, on premises software, data service over 15 years of experience , automated web extraction from any web site, API based access, point and click interface supported and receive email alerts when agents are running successfully.  

ScraperStorm –

It is an AI powered visual web scraping tool, which is used to extract data from any websites without having to write a code. It is powerful and easy to use , you only need to enter a URL and it can identify the content and next pages , simple configuration , one click scraping function. It is a desktop application for Windows, Mac and Linux. It provides intelligent identification, IP rotation and verification code identification, data processing and deduplication, file downloads, scheduling of tasks, automatic export feature, RESTFUL API and webhook and automatic identification of e-commerce SKU and big images.  

Dexi.io –

It is an intelligent automated web scraping tool. It is the most developed web scraping tool which extracts and transforms data from any web source with leading automation and intelligent mining techniques. It allows to scrape with human precision and provides several out of the box integrations, de-duplication of data before sending it to own systems and provides tool where robots fail. 

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