Best Web Scraping Tool
Best Web Browser Best Web Scraping Tools

Monday, February 01, 2021

Web Scraping (also termed Screen Scraping, Web Data Extraction, Web Harvesting etc.) is a technique employed to extract large amounts of data from websites whereby the data is extracted and saved to a local file in your computer or to a database in table (spreadsheet) format. Data displayed by most websites can only be viewed using a web browser. Hi there, Here are some good tools for you to consider: Scrapeworks 80 Legs Content grabber Diggernaut Difbot I see that your scraping needs require a quick and easy solution. There are a lot of scraping tools available in the market that can help.

A web scraper (also known as web crawler) is a tool or a piece of code that performs the process to extract data from web pages on the Internet. Various web scrapers have played an important role in the boom of big data and make it easy for people to scrape the data they need.

Among various web scrapers, open-source web scrapers allow users to code based on their source code or framework, and fuel a massive part to help scrape in a fast, simple but extensive way. We will walk through the top 10 open source web scrapers in 2020.

1. Scrapy

Language: Python

Scrapy is the most popular open-source and collaborative web scraping tool in Python. It helps to extract data efficiently from websites, processes them as you need, and store them in your preferred format(JSON, XML, and CSV). It’s built on top of a twisted asynchronous networking framework that can accept requests and process them faster. With Scrapy, you’ll be able to handle large web scraping projects in an efficient and flexible way.

Advantages:

Fast and powerful
Easy to use with detailed documentation
Ability to plug new functions without having to touch the core
A healthy community and abundant resources
Cloud environment to run the scrapers

2. Heritrix

Language: JAVA

Heritrix is a JAVA based open source scarper with high extensibility and designed for web archiving. It highly respects the robot.txt exclusion directives and Meta robot tags and collects data at a measured, adaptive pace unlikely to disrupt normal website activities. It provides a web-based user interface accessible with a web browser for operator control and monitoring of crawls.

Advantages:

Replaceable pluggable modules
Web-based interface
Respect to the robot.txt and Meta robot tags
Excellent extensibility

3. Web-Harvest

Language: JAVA

Web-Harvest is an open-source scraper written in Java. It can collect useful data from specified pages. In order to do that, it mainly leverages techniques and technologies such as XSLT, XQuery, and Regular Expressions to operate or filter content from HTML/XML based web sites. It could be easily supplemented by custom Java libraries to augment its extraction capabilities.

Advantages:

Powerful text and XML manipulation processors for data handling and control flow
The variable context for storing and using variables
Real scripting languages supported, which can be easily integrated within scraper configurations

4. MechanicalSoup

Language: Python

MechanicalSoup is a Python library designed to simulate the human’s interaction with websites when using a browser. It was built around Python giants Requests (for http sessions) and BeautifulSoup (for document navigation). It automatically stores and sends cookies, follows redirects, and follows links and submits forms. If you try to simulate human behaviors like waiting for a certain event or click certain items rather than just scraping data, MechanicalSoup is really useful.

Best Web Scraping Tool

Advantages:

Ability to simulate human behavior
Blazing fast for scraping fairly simple websites
Support CSS & XPath selectors

5. Apify SDK

Language: JavaScript

Apify SDK is one of the best web scrapers built in JavaScript. The scalable scraping library enables the development of data extraction and web automation jobs with headless Chrome and Puppeteer. With its unique powerful tools like RequestQueue and AutoscaledPool, you can start with several URLs and recursively follow links to other pages and can run the scraping tasks at the maximum capacity of the system respectively.

Advantages:

Scrape with largescale and high performance
Apify Cloud with a pool of proxies to avoid detection
Built-in support of Node.jsplugins like Cheerio and Puppeteer

6. Apache Nutch

Language: JAVA

Apache Nutch, another open-source scraper coded entirely in Java, has a highly modular architecture, allowing developers to create plug-ins for media-type parsing, data retrieval, querying and clustering. Being pluggable and modular, Nutch also provides extensible interfaces for custom implementations.

Advantages:

Highly extensible and scalable
Obey txt rules
Vibrant community and active development
Pluggable parsing, protocols, storage, and indexing

7. Jaunt

Language: JAVA

Jaunt, based on JAVA, is designed for web-scraping, web-automation and JSON querying. It offers a fast, ultra-light and headless browser which provides web-scraping functionality, access to the DOM, and control over each HTTP Request/Response, but does not support JavaScript.

Advantages:

Process individual HTTP Requests/Responses
Easy interfacing with REST APIs
Support for HTTP, HTTPS & basic auth
RegEx-enabled querying in DOM & JSON

8. Node-crawler

Language: JavaScript

Node-crawler is a powerful, popular and production web crawler based on Node.js. It is completely written in Node.js and natively supports non-blocking asynchronous I/O, which provides a great convenience for the crawler's pipeline operation mechanism. At the same time, it supports the rapid selection of DOM, (no need to write regular expressions), and improves the efficiency of crawler development.

Advantages:

Rate control
Different priorities for URL requests
Configurable pool size and retries
Server-side DOM & automatic jQuery insertion with Cheerio (default) or JSDOM

9. PySpider

Language: Python

Best Web Browser Best Web Scraping Tools

PySpider is a powerful web crawler system in Python. It has an easy-to-use Web UI and a distributed architecture with components like scheduler, fetcher, and processor. It supports various databases, such as MongoDB and MySQL, for data storage.

Advantages:

Powerful WebUI with a script editor, task monitor, project manager, and result viewer
RabbitMQ, Beanstalk, Redis, and Kombu as the message queue
Distributed architecture

10. StormCrawler