20 Best Data and Web Scraping Tools
Data is the new oil. Nowadays, Everyone needs data whether you are running an e-commerce business, performing quantitative research, working in cyber threat intelligence, or blockchain, or else analyzing it and making better decisions.
Data Scientists spend almost 50-80% of their time collecting and curating the data for the projects.
In this blog, I will share the list of best tools to scrape data from the web and also tag a few of the industries which specific tools would be useful for. These tools are categorized as no-code, low-code, and code in no specific manner.
TL;DR: Do you know programming? Go for Scrapy, BeautifulSoup and Selenium. And that’s what all you need.
Code:
- Sequentum
- Scrapy
- BeautifulSoup
- DiffBot
- Dexi.io
- Selenium
- Zyte.com
- Newspaper3k
- Twint
- Tabula
Low Code:
No Code:
- Octoparse
- Mozenda
- ParseHub
- CrawlMonster
- Common Crawl
- Crawly
- Helium Scraper
- Web Content Extractor
- WebHarvey
- Web Sundew
Hire Me:
Are you seeking a proficient individual for web scraping and data engineering services? I am available and eager to undertake the task at hand. I look forward to hearing from you in regard to potential opportunities.
Code
1. Scrapy
Scrapy is an open-source and collaborative framework for extracting the data you need from websites. In a fast, simple, yet extensible way.
Personally, I like it best cause it provides structure to the code, scalability, and has many useful built-in functionalities.
Best for Industries: General
2. BeautifulSoup
Beautiful Soup is a Python library for pulling data out of HTML and XML files. It works with your favorite parser to provide idiomatic ways of navigating, searching, and modifying the parse tree. It commonly saves programmers hours or days of work.
Best for Industries: General
3. Selenium
Selenium is primarily for automating web applications for testing purposes but is certainly not limited to just that.
Boring web-based administration tasks can (and should) also be automated as well including web scraping and extracting data.
Best for Industries: General
4. Twint
Twint is an advanced Twitter scraping tool written in Python that allows for scraping Tweets from Twitter profiles without using Twitter’s API.
I have a comprehensive tutorial on it that shows how I scraped a whole country's Twitter data.
Best for Industries: Elections, semantic analysis, Social Media
5. NewsPaper3k
Newspaper3k is a python library to scrape newspaper websites. It helps in retrieving article information, its source information, articles meta-information too. It also provides NLP support to extract tags and curate a summary of the article. It supports multiple languages, translations.
Best for Industries: News, NLP, Data engineers, Machine learning engineers, Financial markets, semantic analysis, Journalists
6. Sequentum (ContentGrabber)
Sequentum is an enterprise-level web scraping tool. It provides complete control for web data extraction, document management, and intelligent process automation (IPA). Our end-to-end platform provides the flexibility to be used in-house or you can outsource your web data extraction needs to our experienced Managed Data Services group. Our tools create software configuration files that define exactly what data to extract, quality control monitors, and output specifications to any format or endpoint.
Best for Industries: General
7. DiffBot
Diffbot offers several APIs for AI-based extraction of web pages. Diffbot uses computer vision and natural language processing techniques in order to automatically categorize pages into types (article, product, discussion, nav page) and automatically extract their contents into structured entities, which are returned as JSON.
7. Tabula
Tabula is a tool for liberating data tables locked inside PDF files. It helps to extract tables from pdf and save them into CSV, TSV, JSON.
Following is a tutorial blog for converting pdf to JSON.
Low Code
1. ScrapeHero
Scrape hero provides APIs and enterprise-grade web scraping services to streamline your e-commerce data decisions.
They also provide data as a service and sell datasets on their data store.
Best for Industries: Investors, Hedge Funds, Market Analysis
No Code
1. Mozenda
Mozenda is a browser-based web scraping tool. It’s a point and click-based tool. They also provide data visualization services. Meaning, it eliminates the need to hire a data analyst. It also provides region-specific data scraping capabilities. It also downloads images and files.
Best for Industries: Digital Marketing, Manufacturing
2. Octoparse
Octoparse is a point-click interface no-code browser-based web scraping platform.
It simulates human web browsing behavior like opening a web page, logging into an account, etc. It also provides web crawling templates for websites including Amazon, eBay, Twitter, BestBuy, and many others.
I like its interface and ease of use.
Best for Industries: E-commerce, General,
3. ParseHub
ParseHub is an advanced free web scraping tool. It also has a point-click interface with IP rotation, cloud-based and scheduling features.
Its website provides dozens of tutorials to get started with scraping in multiple domains including e-commerce, financial websites.
4. CrawlMonster
The CrawlMonster platform was meticulously engineered to provide users with an unmatched level of data discoverability, extraction, and reporting by analyzing an entire website’s architecture from every angle end to end. Our goal is to provide our users with more actionable optimization data points than any other crawler platform period.
Best for Industries: SEO, Digital Marketes.
Academia, Students, Researchers, Statistician
5. Helium Scraper
Helium Scraper is a desktop application-based web scraper.
Websites that show lists of information generally do it by querying a database and displaying the data in a user-friendly manner. A web scraper reverses this process by taking unstructured sites and turning them back into an organized database. This data can then be exported to a database or a spreadsheet file, such as CSV or Excel.
Best for Industries: Finance
Honorable desktop mentions
- Web Content Extractor
- WebHarvey
- Web Sundew
Hire Me:
Do you need to crawl a website and scrape the data or need data engineering work? I am open to work. Looking forward to hearing from you.
About Author:
Asim is an applied research data engineer with a passion for developing impactful products. He possesses expertise in building data platforms and has a proven track record of success as a dual Kaggle expert. Asim has held leadership positions such as Google Developer Student Club (GDSC) Lead and AWS Educate Cloud Ambassador, which have allowed him to hone his skills in driving business success.
In addition to his technical skills, Asim is a strong communicator and team player. He enjoys connecting with like-minded professionals and is always open to networking opportunities. If you appreciate his work and would like to connect, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
