Top 20 Web Crawling Tools to Scrape Websites Quickly
A reference of 20 web crawlers
Web crawling (also known as web scraping or screen scraping) is broadly applied in many fields today. Before a web crawler tool ever becomes public, it is the magic word for people with no programming skills.
Its high threshold keeps blocking people outside the door of big data. A web scraping tool is an automated crawling technology and it bridges the wedge between the mysterious big data and everyone else.
- It prevents repetitive work like copying and pasting.
- It puts extracted data into a well-structured format, including, but not limited to, Excel, HTML, and CSV.
- It saves you time and money because you don’t have to get a professional data analyst.
- It is the cure for marketers, sellers, journalists, YouTubers, researchers, and many others who lack technical skills.
Here is the deal.
I’ve listed the 20 best web crawlers for you as a reference. You’re welcome to take full advantage of it!
1. Octoparse
Don’t get confused by its cute icon; Octoparse is a robust website crawler for extracting almost every kind of data you need on websites.
You can use Octoparse to rip a website with its extensive functionalities and capabilities. It has two kinds of operation mode — Wizard Mode and Advanced Mode — for non-programmers to quickly pick it up.
The user-friendly point-and-click interface can guide you through the entire extraction process. As a result, you can pull website content easily and save it into structured formats like Excel, TXT, HTML, or your databases in a short time frame.
In addition, it provides scheduled cloud extraction which enables you to extract the dynamic data in real-time and keep a tracking record of the website updates.
You can also extract complex websites with a difficult structure by using its built-in Regex and XPath configuration to locate elements precisely. You have no need to worry about IP blocking anymore.
Octoparse offers IP proxy servers which will automate the IP’s, leaving without being detected by aggressive websites. To conclude, Octoparse should be able to satisfy most of the users’ crawling needs, both basic or advanced, without any coding skills.
Use Cases:
- Extract from Twitter
- Scrape Google Maps Data
- Scrape Amazon for Product Research
- Extract and Download Images
- Scrape from Yahoo Finance
2. Cyotek WebCopy
WebCopy is illustrative like its name. It’s a free website crawler which allows you to copy partial or full websites locally onto your hard disk for offline reference.
You can change its settings to tell the bot how you want to crawl. Besides that, you can also configure domain aliases, user agent strings, default documents, and more.
However, WebCopy does not include a virtual DOM or any form of JavaScript parsing. If a website makes heavy use of JavaScript to operate, it’s likely WebCopy will not be able to make a true copy. Chances are, it will not correctly handle dynamic website layouts due to the heavy use of JavaScript.
3. HTTrack
As a website crawler freeware, HTTrack provides functions well suited for downloading an entire website to your PC. It has versions available for Windows, Linux, Sun Solaris, and other Unix systems, which covers most users.
It is interesting that HTTrack can mirror one site, or more than one site together (with shared links). You can decide the number of connections to open concurrently while downloading web pages under “set options”.
You can get the photos, files, and HTML code from its mirrored website and resume interrupted downloads.
In addition, proxy support is available within HTTTrack for maximizing speed.
HTTrack works as a command-line program, or through a shell for both private (capture) or professional (on-line web mirror) use. With that said, HTTrack should be preferred and used more by people with advanced programming skills.
4. Getleft
Getleft is a free and easy-to-use website grabber. It allows you to download an entire website or any single web page. After you launch Getleft, you can enter a URL and choose the files you want to download before it gets started.
While it goes, it changes all the links for local browsing. Additionally, it offers multilingual support. Now, Getleft supports 14 languages! However, it only provides limited FTP support, it will download the files but not recursively.
Getleft should satisfy users’ basic crawling needs without more complex tactical skills.
5. Scraper
Scraper is a Chrome extension with limited data extraction features but it’s helpful for online research. It also allows you to export the data to Google Spreadsheets.
This tool is intended for beginners and experts. You can easily copy the data to the clipboard or store to the spreadsheets using OAuth. Scraper can auto-generate XPaths for defining URLs to crawl.
It doesn’t offer all-inclusive crawling services, but most people don’t need to tackle messy configurations anyway.
6. OutWit
OutWit Hub is a Firefox add-on with dozens of data extraction features to simplify your web searches. This web crawler tool can browse through pages and store the extracted information in a proper format.
OutWit Hub offers a single interface for scraping tiny or huge amounts of data per needs. It allows you to scrape any web page from the browser itself. It can even create automatic agents to extract data.
It is one of the simplest web scraping tools, which is free to use and offers you the convenience to extract web data without writing a single line of code.
7. ParseHub
ParseHub is a great web crawler which supports collecting data from websites that use AJAX technology, JavaScript, cookies, etc. Its machine learning technology can read, analyze, and then transform web documents into relevant data.
The desktop application of ParseHub supports systems such as Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. You even can use the web app which is built within the browser.
As a freeware, you can set up no more than five public projects in ParseHub. The paid subscription plans allow you to create at least 20 private projects for scraping websites.
8. VisualScraper
VisualScraper is another great free and non-coding web scraper with a simple point-and-click interface. You can get real-time data from several web pages and export the extracted data as CSV, XML, JSON, or SQL files.
Besides SaaS, VisualScraper offers web scraping services such as data delivery services and creating software extractors services.
VisualScraper enables users to schedule their projects to be run at a specific time or repeat the sequence every minute, day, week, month, or year. Users could use it to extract news, updates, or forums frequently.
9. Scrapinghub
Scrapinghub is a cloud-based data extraction tool that helps thousands of developers to fetch valuable data. Its open-source visual scraping tool allows users to scrape websites without any programming knowledge.
Scrapinghub uses Crawlera, a smart proxy rotator that supports bypassing bot counter-measures to crawl huge or bot-protected sites easily. It enables users to crawl from multiple IPs and locations without the pain of proxy management through a simple HTTP API.
Scrapinghub converts the entire web page into organized content. Its team of experts is available for help in case its crawl builder doesn’t work to requirements.
10. Dexi.io
As a browser-based web crawler, Dexi.io allows you to scrape data based on your browser from any website and provide three types of robots for you to create a scraping task — Extractor, Crawler, and Pipes.
The freeware provides anonymous web proxy servers for your web scraping and your extracted data will be hosted on Dexi.io’s servers for two weeks before the data is 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.
11. Webhose.io
Webhose.io enables users to get real-time data from crawling online sources from all over the world into various, clean formats. This web crawler enables you to crawl data and further extract keywords in many different languages, using multiple filters covering a wide array of sources.
And, you can save the scraped data in XML, JSON, and RSS formats. Users are allowed to access the history data from its archive. Plus, webhose.io supports at most 80 languages with its crawling data results.
Users can easily index and search the structured data crawled by Webhose.io. It may satisfy users’ elementary crawling requirements.
Users are able to form their own datasets by simply importing the data from a particular web page and exporting the data to CSV.
12. Import.io
You can easily scrape thousands of web pages in minutes without writing a single line of code and build 1000+ APIs based on your requirements.
Public APIs have provided powerful and flexible capabilities to control Import.io programmatically and gain automated access to the data. Import.io has made crawling easier by integrating web data into your own app or web site with just a few clicks.
To better serve users’ crawling requirements, it also offers a free app for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux to build data extractors and crawlers, download data, and sync with the online account. Plus, users are able to schedule crawling tasks weekly, daily, or hourly.
13. 80legs
80legs is a powerful web crawling tool that can be configured based on customized requirements.
It supports fetching huge amounts of data along with the option to download the extracted data instantly. 80legs provides high-performance web crawling that works rapidly and fetches required data in mere seconds.
14. Spinn3r
Spinn3r allows you to fetch entire data from blogs, news, social media sites, RSS feeds, and ATOM feeds.
Spinn3r is distributed with a firehouse API that manages 95% of the indexing work. It offers advanced spam protection, which removes spam and inappropriate language use, thus improving data safety.
Spinn3r indexes content similarly to Google and save the extracted data in JSON files. The web scraper constantly scans the web and finds updates from multiple sources to get you real-time publications.
Its admin console lets you control crawls and full-text search, allowing complex queries on raw data.
15. Content Grabber
Content Grabber is a web crawling software targeted at enterprises. It allows you to create a stand-alone web crawling agent. It can extract content from almost any website and save it as structured data in a format of your choice, including Excel reports, XML, CSV, and most databases.
It is more suitable for people with advanced programming skills, as it offers many powerful scripting, editing, and debugging interfaces for people in need.
Users are allowed to use C# or VB.NET to debug or write scripts to control the crawling process programming. For example, Content Grabber can integrate with Visual Studio 2013 for the most powerful script editing, debugging, and unit testing for an advanced and tactful customized crawler, based on users’ particular needs.
16. Helium Scraper
Helium Scraper is a visual web data crawling software that works pretty well when the association between elements is small. It’s non-coding and non-configuration. And, users can get access to online templates based on various crawling needs.
Basically, it could satisfy users’ crawling needs within an elementary level.
17. UiPath
UiPath is a robotic process automation software for free web scraping. It automates web and desktop data crawling for most third-party apps.
You can install the robotic process automation software if you run it on Windows. UiPath is able to extract tabular and pattern-based data across multiple web pages.
UiPath has provided built-in tools for further crawling. This method is very effective when dealing with complex UIs. The screen scraping tool can handle both individual text elements, groups of text, and blocks of text, such as data extraction in table format.
Plus, no programming is needed to create intelligent web agents, but the .NET hacker inside you will have complete control over the data.
18. scrape.it
Scrape.it is a Node.js web-scraping software. It’s a cloud-based web data extraction tool.
It’s designed towards those with advanced programming skills, as it has offered both public and private packages to discover, reuse, update, and share code with millions of developers worldwide.
Its powerful integration will help you build a customized crawler based on your needs.
19. WebHarvy
WebHarvy is a point-and-click web scraping software. It’s designed for non-programmers. WebHarvy can automatically scrape text, images, URLs, and emails from websites, and save the scraped content in various formats.
It also provides a built-in scheduler and proxy support which enables anonymously crawling and prevents the web scraping software from being blocked by web servers. You have the option to access target websites via proxy servers or VPN.
Users can save the data extracted from web pages in a variety of formats. The current version of the WebHarvy web scraper allows you to export the scraped data as an XML, CSV, JSON, or TSV file. Users can also export the scraped data to an SQL database.
20. Connotate
Connotate is an automated web crawler designed for enterprise-scale web content extraction which needs an enterprise-scale solution.
Business users can easily create extraction agents in as little as minutes — without any programming. Users can create extraction agents simply by point-and-click.
It is able to automatically extract over 95% of sites without programming, including complex JavaScript-based dynamic site technologies, such as Ajax. And, Connotate supports any language for data crawling most sites.
Additionally, Connotate also offers the function to integrate webpage and database content, including content from SQL databases and MongoDB for database extraction.
Conclusion
To conclude, the crawlers I mentioned above can satisfy the basic crawling needs for most users, while there are still many variances with the functionalities among these tools, as many of these crawler tools have provided more advanced and built-in configuration tools for users.
Thus, be sure you have fully understood what characteristics a crawler provides before you subscribe to it.