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Top 30 Free Web Scraping Software in 2024

10 min read

Web Scraping & Web Scraping Software

Web scraping (also termed web data extraction, screen scraping, or web harvesting) is a technique for extracting data from websites. It turns web data scattered across pages into structured data that can be stored in your local computer in a spreadsheet or transmitted to a database.

It can be difficult to build a web scraper for people who don’t know anything about coding. Luckily, there is data scraping software available for people with or without programming skills. Also, if you’re a data scientist or a researcher, using a web scraper definitely raises your working effectiveness in data collection.

Here is a list of the 30 most popular free web scraping software. I just put them together under the umbrella of software, while they range from open-source libraries, and browser extensions to desktop software and more.

Top 30 Free Web Scraping Tools

Who is this for: Everyone without coding skills who need to scrape web data at scale. This web scraping software is widely used among online sellers, marketers, researchers, and data analysts.

Why you should use it: Octoparse is a free-for-life SaaS web data platform. With its intuitive interface and auto-detecting function, you can scrape web data with points and clicks. It also provides ready-to-use web scraping templates to extract data from Amazon, eBay, Twitter, BestBuy, etc. If you are looking for a one-stop data solution, Octoparse also provides web data services. Or you can simply follow the Octoparse user guide to scrape website data easily for free.

octoparse free web scraper

2. Beautiful Soup – Python library

Who is this for: Developers who are proficient at programming to build a web scraper/web crawler to crawl the websites.

Why you should use it: Beautiful Soup is an open-source Python library designed for web-scraping HTML and XML files. It is the top Python parser that has been widely used. If you have programming skills, it works best when you combine this library with Python.

3. Import.io

Who is this for: Enterprises with a budget looking for integration solutions on web data.

Why you should use it: Import.io is a SaaS web data platform. It provides a web scraping solution that allows you to scrape data from websites and organize them into data sets. They can integrate the web data into analytic tools for sales and marketing to gain insight.

4. Mozenda

Who is this for: Enterprises and businesses with scalable data needs.

Why you should use it: Mozenda provides a data extraction tool that makes it easy to capture content from the web. They also provide data visualization services. It eliminates the need to hire a data analyst. And Mozenda team offers services to customize integration options.

5. Parsehub

Who is this for: Data analysts, marketers, and researchers who lack programming skills.

Why you should use it: ParseHub is a visual web scraping tool to get data from the web. You can extract the data by clicking any fields on the website. It also has an IP rotation function that helps change your IP address when you encounter aggressive websites with anti-scraping techniques.

6. Crawlmonster

Who is this for: SEO and marketers

Why you should use it: CrawlMonster is a free web scraping tool. It enables you to scan websites and analyze your website content, source code, page status, etc.

7. ProWebScraper

Who is this for: Enterprise looking for integration solution on web data.

Why you should use it: Connotate has been working together with Import.io, which provides a solution for automating web data scraping. It provides web data service that helps you to scrape, collect and handle the data.

8. Common Crawl

Who is this for: Researchers, students, and professors.

Why you should use it: Common Crawl is founded by the idea of open source in the digital age. It provides open datasets of crawled websites. It contains raw web page data, extracted metadata, and text extractions.

9. Crawly

Who is this for: People with basic data requirements.

Why you should use it: Crawly provides an automatic web scraping service that scrapes a website and turns unstructured data into structured formats like JSON and CSV. They can extract limited elements within seconds, which include Title Text, HTML, Comments, DateEntity Tags, Author, Image URLs, Videos, Publisher, and country.

10. Content Grabber

Who is this for: Python developers who are proficient at programming.

Why you should use it: Content Grabber is a web scraping tool targeted at enterprises. You can create your own web scraping agents with its integrated 3rd party tools. It is very flexible in dealing with complex websites and data extraction.

11. Diffbot

Who is this for: Developers and business.

Why you should use it: Diffbot is a web scraping tool that uses machine learning and algorithms and public APIs for extracting data from web pages. You can use Diffbot to do competitor analysis, price monitoring, analyze consumer behaviors, and many more.

12. Dexi.io

Who is this for: People with programming and scraping skills.

Why you should use it: Dexi.io is a browser-based web crawler. It provides three types of robots — Extractors, crawlers, and Pipes. PIPES has a Master robot feature where 1 robot can control multiple tasks. It supports many 3rd party services (captcha solvers, cloud storage, etc) which you can easily integrate into your robots.

13. DataScraping.co

Who is this for: Data analysts, Marketers, and researchers who lack programming skills.

Why you should use it: Data Scraping Studio is a free web scraping tool to harvest data from web pages, HTML, XML, and pdf. The desktop client is currently available for Windows only.

14. Easy Web Extract

Who is this for: Businesses with limited data needs, marketers, and researchers who lack programming skills.

Why you should use it: Easy Web Extract is a visual web scraping tool for business purposes. It can extract the content (text, URL, image, files) from web pages and transform results into multiple formats.

15. Scrapy

Who is this for: Python developers with programming and scraping skills.

Why you should use it: Scrapy can be used to build a web scraper. What is great about this product is that it has an asynchronous networking library which allows you to move on to the next task before it finishes.

16. Helium Scraper

helium scraper

Who is this for: Data analysts, Marketers, and researchers who lack programming skills.

Why you should use it: Helium Scraper is a visual web data scraping tool that works pretty well, especially on small elements on the website. It has a user-friendly point-and-click interface which makes it easier to use.

17. Scrape.it

Who is this for: People who need scalable data without coding.

Why you should use it: It allows scraped data to be stored on the local drive that you authorize. You can build a scraper using their Web Scraping Language (WSL), which is easy to learn and requires no coding. It is a good choice and worth a try if you are looking for a security-wise web scraping tool.

18. ScraperWiki

Who is this for: A Python and R data analysis environment. Ideal for economists, statisticians, and data managers who are new to coding.

Why you should use it: ScraperWiki consists of 2 parts. One is QuickCode which is designed for economists, statisticians, and data managers with knowledge of Python and R language. The second part is The Sensible Code Company which provides web data services to turn messy information into structured data.

19. Zyte

Who is this for: Python/web scraping developers

Why you should use it: Zyte, also known as Scraping Hub, is a cloud-based web platform. It has four different types of tools — Scrapy Cloud, Portia, Crawlera, and Splash. It is great that Zyte offers a collection of IP addresses covering more than 50 countries. This is a solution for IP banning problems.

20. Screen-Scraper

Who is this for: For businesses related to the auto, medical, financial, and e-commerce industries.

Why you should use it: Screen Scraper is more convenient and basic compared to other web scraping tools like Octoparse. It has a steep learning curve for people without web scraping experience.

21. Demand AI

Who is this for: Marketers and sales.

Why you should use it: Demand AI is a web scraping tool that helps salespeople to gather data from professional network sites like LinkedIn, Angellist, and Viadeo.

22. ScrapeHero

Who is this for: Investors, Hedge Funds, Market Analysts

Why you should use it: As an API provider, ScrapeHero enables you to turn websites into data. It provides customized web data services for businesses and enterprises.

23. UiPathRPA tool

Who is this for: Bussiness in all sizes.

Why you should use it: UiPath is a robotic process automation software for free web scraping. It allows users to create, deploy and administer automation in business processes. It is a great option for business users since it helps you create rules for data management.

24. Web Content Extractor

Who is this for: Data analysts, Marketers, and researchers who lack of programming skills.

Why you should use it: Web Content Extractor is an easy-to-use web scraping tool for individuals and enterprises. You can go to their website and try its 14-day free trial.

25. WebHarvy

webharvy

Who is this for: Data analysts, Marketers, and researchers who lack programming skills.

Why you should use it: WebHarvy is a point-and-click web scraping tool. It’s designed for non-programmers. They provide helpful web scraping tutorials for beginners. However, the extractor doesn’t allow you to schedule your scraping projects.

26. Web Scraper.io – Chrome extension

Who is this for: Data analysts, Marketers, and researchers who lack programming skills.

Why you should use it: Web Scraper is a Chrome browser extension scraper built for scraping data from websites. It’s a free web scraping tool for scraping dynamic web pages.

27. Web Sundew

Who is this for: Enterprises, marketers, and researchers.

Why you should use it: WebSundew is a visual scraping tool that works for structured web data scraping. The Enterprise edition allows you to run the scraping projects on a remote server and publish collected data through FTP.

28. Web Robots

Who is this for: Data analysts, Marketers, and researchers who lack programming skills.

Why you should use it: Web Robots is a cloud-based web scraping platform for scraping dynamic Javascript-heavy websites. It has a web browser extension as well as desktop software, making it easy to scrape data from websites.

29. Selenium – Python library

Who is this for: Web scrapers, quality assurance testers, web developers, researchers, etc., who have knowledge on coding.

Why you should use it: Selenium is a powerful web scraping and test automation framework that allows you to interact with web browsers, scrape dynamic content, automate repetitive tasks, test web applications, and gather data from websites. It provides flexibility, wide language support, and extensive community support.

30. Puppeteer – Node.js library

Who is this for: Web developers, automation enthusiasts, data analysts, and who are known about coding.

Why you should use it: Puppeteer is a Node.js library developed by Google that provides a high-level API for controlling headless Chrome or Chromium browsers. It allows you to automate web interactions, scrape dynamic content, perform browser testing, generate screenshots or PDFs, and more. Puppeteer is easy to set up, offers powerful features for web automation, and is well-suited for tasks such as web scraping, testing, and generating visual reports.

Read the article about the top programming languages so that you can get more knowledge in coding.

Closing Thoughts

Extracting data from websites with web scraping tools is a time-saving method, especially for those who don’t have sufficient coding knowledge. There are many factors you should consider when choosing a proper tool to facilitate your web scraping, such as ease of use, API integration, cloud-based extraction, large-scale scraping, scheduling projects, etc. Web scraping software like Octoparse not only provides all the features I just mentioned but also provides data service for teams of all sizes – from start-ups to large enterprises.

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