Alternatively known as Web Data Extraction, Web Scraping involves the process of retrieving heavy volumes of data from different websites. But unlike the mundane and conventional process of manually retrieving the data points, web scraping harnesses the power of automation to extract millions of data points almost instantly. But how exactly is web scraping performed? The answer is simple- through web scraping tools. In this article, we will talk about many such web scraping tools and underline why and how Scraper API stands ahead of others.
What is Scraper API?
Scraper API is a simple tool that lets you build scalable web scrapers quickly and easily. The web scrapers built through Scraper API can handle almost everything including (but not limited to) proxy, browser, and complex web captcha. After building the web scraper, users can instantly get the HTML code from any random web page via a single API call.
Scraper API doesn’t overburden users with the task of handling their own proxies. Instead, it handles its internal pool comprising of multiple proxies from various proxy providers. Besides, the tool also comes with a smart routing logic that automatically routes requests via every type of subnet, controlling and managing every individual request to avoid potential IP address bans and CAPTCHA errors.
One of the defining features of Scraper API is that it can instantly rotate the IP address with every individual API request. This way, users won’t have to bear the hassle of IP blocks or complicated captchas anymore. It also instantly retires failed requests thereby ensuring that no user is blocked at any point. The result: users can convert any number of websites into actionable data by simply automating their captcha codes.
Unlike other popular data scraping tools, Scraper API enables users to tweak the request header, type of request, geolocation of the IP, and more. It supports geotagging to more than twelve countries and assists in rendering javascript with headless browsers. The best part: users get to enjoy all of these features and more with 99.99% uptime and unlimited bandwidth.
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Features at a Glance
Scraper API supports the following features:
· Let’s you access 85+ review sites in Standard JSON Format
· Ensures quick and advanced duplicate detection
· Enables you to review responses in real-time
· Offers clean data in uniform formats
· Detects verified and updated reviews of metadata
· And more
So, in a way, Scraper API is one of the best web scraping options for developers with its easy customization options, automatic proxy routing capabilities, and its set of special proxies for every possible type of web scraping.
What Are the Alternatives?
At this point, you’re probably wondering what other web scraping tools have to offer. In this section, we’ll discuss some alternative tools with their offerings in detail.
ScrapeSimple
ScrapeSimple is ideal for everyone who’s looking for a customized web scraping tool. All you need to do is customize the tool depending on the type of information you need. Right after that, it’ll periodically deliver the required details in CSV format. You can set the frequency of emails according to your convenience. This application is ideal for those businesses that require a basic HTML scraper without having to write the code from scratch. The response time is relatively quick and the application too is simple and user-friendly.
Despite coming with a bunch of decent features, Scrapy isn’t as efficient as Scraper API. One of its biggest cons lies in the time taken for data scraping. Unlike many other tools with similar features, Scrapy takes around 30 to 40 minutes to scrape moderately data-heavy websites. Also, given its many downsides, the product doesn’t seem to be as cost-effective as its competitors.
Scrapy
Scrapy is an open-source application that can be accessed free of cost. It is ideal for Python developers who want to build a reliable web crawler. The tool has a decent crawling framework that can manage everything from queuing server requests to handling proxies. While it is not as user-friendly, the application is fairly well-documented, and you’ll find multiple web-based tutorials on getting started. Deploying crawlers through Scrapy is equally simple. All you need to do is set the request after which the processes can automatically run without any intervention. Being a well-featured web scraping tool, Scrapy can be integrated with various applications to handle diverse use cases.
With that said, Scrappy also comes with its fair share of cons. One of them is that users need to plug in a specific javascript framework like phatntomjs for the tool to work. If you’re using a conventional framework like Selenium, it'll take ages to scrape data-heavy websites with thousands of landing pages.
ParseHub
This is yet another excellent web scraping tool that helps you build quality web scrapers without having to code. Given its many benefits, Parsehub is used by professionals from diverse domains. As with Scraper API, Parsehub is extremely simple to operate. All you need to do is click on your required data. The tool will then proceed to export that data in your preferred format. As of now, ParseHub supports both Excel and JSON format.
This application comes with tonnes of useful features like instant IP rotation, data retrieval from tables, data retrieval from dropdowns, and more. The best part: it comes with a generous free package that allows users to scrape up to 200 pages of data in a few minutes. Since ParseHub is also compatible with multiple operating systems, you can run it regardless of the device or the operating system you’re using.
Regardless of these perks, Parsehub comes with one major disadvantage. Unlike Scraper API, it has limited integration with javascript or regex. In certain instances, you may not even receive responses if your chosen website is data-heavy.
Diffbot
Diffbot is tailored for the enterprises who have specific requirements for data scraping and crawling. They are especially designed for those organizations that need to scrape websites that continuously update or alter their basic HTML structure.
