What Is A Website Ripper?
A website ripper or site ripper is a tool that helps you download the whole or part of a website’s content to your local server so you can visit it offline. Although it seems like an outdated tool given that so many web scraping software are available for different needs, it was popular in the past for the following reasons:
- People can visit the site’s content during offline hours.
- People can download the site as a copy to backup and move the site to another server.
And for these two purposes, there are some good site grabbers that help you rip a website. Below, I will walk you through 5 of them and their perspective pros and cons. The first one is a better and more advanced solution and is compatible with modern websites and technologies.
Top 5 Website Rippers
- Octoparse (RECOMMENDED)
Like all the website rippers, Octoparse doesn’t need code to grab website content. It outperforms the other website rippers by adding numerous features that are compatible with modern website technologies, such as anti-blocking(IP Rotation, proxies, login, CAPTCHAs), and dynamic content handling (infinite scrolling, AJAX, etc). By using these techniques, users can access dynamic and protected content that traditional site grabbers cannot reach. Octoparse also provides task scheduling and cloud extraction and storage, which are sweeter considering the fast-changing of websites and information. Cloud service can greatly relieve the pressure on local servers. This is good news for people with a limited internet connection since you don’t need to have your device running all day.
🥰Pros:
- Various pre-built scrapers catering to different circumstances.
- Point-and-click custom scraping interface. Users can build their scraping workflow by mimicking the way they visit the website.
- Free plan available.
- 24/7 highly supportive team that is ready to solve all your problems and needs.
- Frequently updated to keep up with modern technologies.
- Scrape large volumes of precise data without needing to download the whole site.
- Custom scraping service and data service are available.
🤯Cons:
- Premium features are only available in paid plans
How to Use It?
Step 1: Download and register this no-coding website ripper for free.
Step 2: Open the webpage you need to scrape and copy the URL. Then, paste the URL to Octoparse and start auto-scraping. Later, customize the data field from the preview mode or workflow on the right side.
Step 3: Start scraping by clicking on the Run button. The scraped data can be downloaded into an Excel file to your local device.
As a website copier, HTTrack allows users to download a website from the Internet to a local directory, recursively building all directories, and getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to the local computer. For those who want to create a mirror of a website, this web ripper can surely offer a good solution.
🥰Pros:
- Free and Open Source
- The interface is user-friendly
- Users can configure the depth of mirroring, decide which files to download, and set bandwidth limits.
- available for Windows, Linux, macOS, and Android.
- It preserves the relative link structure of the original site, which helps users in navigating the mirrored site offline.
- Support existing mirror website updates.
🤯Cons:
- can consume a lot of bandwidth, especially if you are ripping large websites.
- Lack of techniques to tackle some anti-ripper measures deployed by modern websites.
- Downloading entire websites may violate terms of service and copyright laws.
- Cannot rip dynamic content, which leads to incomplete offline content.
- Although HTTrack is functional, it is not updated frequently and is quite old, which can result in compatibility issues with newer websites and technologies.
Similar to HTTrack, Cyotek WebCopy can scan a website and download its content for offline use, including web pages, images, videos, files, and other media.
🥰Pros:
- Free of charge and has a user-friendly interface
- Users can specify which websites to rip and customize the scraping rules.
- It has a report showing the structure of the ripped website and its files.
- The tool rewrites links to ensure that the offline copy is fully navigable.
- supports a wide range of protocols including HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP.
- Actively maintained and updated compared to HTTrack.
🤯Cons:
- Cannot scrape dynamic content like Javascript and AJAX.
- Downloading large websites can affect system performance.
- Can consume significant bandwidth if you rip a large website, which is hard for people with limited internet connection.
- Lack of techniques to tackle some anti-ripper measures deployed by modern websites.
- Downloading entire websites may violate terms of service and copyright laws.
Though having an outdated interface, this website ripper has all the features of the first two. And what makes it stand out is that it supports multiple languages, making it accessible to a broader audience.
🥰Pros:
- Free and open source
- Multi-Language Support
- Users can choose which files and types of content to download, such as only HTML files, images, or specific directories.
- Maintains the original site’s link structure.
- Runs on multiple operating systems, including Windows, macOS, and Linux.
🤯Cons:
- Outdated Interface
- Cannot deal with dynamic content.
- Detailed analysis reports
- No anti-blocking techniques.
As the name suggests, this site grabber can literally suck a site from the internet by asynchronously copying the site’s webpages, images, PDFs, style sheets, and other files to your local hard drive, duplicating the site’s directory structure. What makes it special is that it is a Macintosh application that is designed exclusively for Mac users.
🥰Pros:
- It can download websites automatically.
- Users can customize download settings.
- It supports resuming interrupted downloads.
- Log and Error Reports.
- Actively maintained and updated
🤯Cons:
- Mac-Only
- Cannot deal with dynamic content.
- Other issues similar to the above mentioned tools.
Conclusion:
Old website rippers still have their market when people want to back up their website or need structure and more source data analysis. For other purposes, no-code scraping software like Octoparse can meet your needs with its various services and free you from the hassle of information hunting and gathering.
