Top 10 Free Web Scraping Tools & Their Pros & Cons

In today’s world, web scraping tools have found a special place among people who want to know more about their competitors.

While web scraping has found its use in research work, marketing, E-Commerce, and sales, it is a software that is designed specially to extract information that might be valuable to its user from other websites.

This is where our tool has turned out to be great at making our user’s lives easier. We at Scrapingpass.com have sought to provide our users with all the tools they need in order to provide perfection in their lives.

• We have developed scraping technology with great efforts for our users which can be implemented with great comfort.
• Our methodology allows the users to scape as much data as possible without having to worry about consequences.
• Our web scraping tools are quite effective and user-friendly and if there’s any query, we’re here to resolve it.

Below we will talk about some free sources that provide scraping technology for their users which are actually quite good and you can check more here.

Some Of The Best Web Scraping Tools :

1. Scrapy :

Scrapy is one of the best available free web scraping tools. It is based on Python and has great user service. 

It provides to its users’ spider bots that can crawl into the framework of various websites. These spider bots can infiltrate various websites at once and afterward, they extract whatever information they get from these websites.

This is quite an effective strategy. 

Also, the users can make their own custom spider bots that have the features they want. Spiders can be hosted on the Scrapy cloud platform or they can also be used as the Scrapy API.

Thus, Scrapy is one of the best web scraping tools for those who want to make scalable crawlers of websites.

Here are some Scrapy features :

• It is easy to use the spider bots to extract and store the links that have been scraped in case of some extensions.
• It is simple and easy to release the crawlers into the internet.
• While the information storage could be messy, it is easier here to make an HTML doc to store it.

2. Apify SDK :

This web scraping tool is very effective and provides a Universal Framework that works on Javascript and not Python or any other language.

Apify SDK is famous for the development of crawlers that scrape data from web sites around the internet and other scrapers or extractors of data.

It also provides web automation jobs.  Crawler scrappers that this service provides is quite stable and efficient.

Therefore its services can be used to scrape any information from any website that the user wants with great ease.

Here are some Apify features :

• Node.js has advanced functions that the user benefits from in Apify SDK.
• Can be used as a stand-alone application or use the cloud functionality of Apify cloud.
• It is easy to run the web scraping crawlers in parallel to the action of managing the URL queries at maximum capacity.

3. Webscraper.io :

This is another handy and useful free web scraping tool that works with a clean and simple interface.

It is good for users who lack prior knowledge of programming and are entirely new to the technological field, it requires no previous knowledge of scraping or any other language of programming but has a simple point-and-click user interface that makes it easy to use.

At a certain level, most of the other web scraping tools require knowledge of programming languages.

Hence, this service is best suited for businesses and marketers who do not have any such experience or knowledge.

Here are some of the features of Webscraper.io

• A great thing is that the data that is scraped is stored in the local storage and hence, is easily accessible.
• It supports the scraping of multiple webpages all at once.
• The scraped data that the user has extracted can be easily traversed.
• The data that has been scraped is easily exportable in the CSV format.
• Sitemaps can be easily imported and exported which is quite a good feature.

4. Cheerio :

Node JS developers are always looking for services that can help them scrap the information they want and also give them a straightforward way in order to parse the HTML.

Here comes the Cheerio services.

Cheerio is a useful web scraping tool that is a subset of the core jQuery library.

This means that the user can easily swap their jQuery along with the Cheerio environment in order to implement the JavaScript scraping.

This is what makes it quite fast.

Also, the platform provides many methods that are quite helpful in extracting HTML, ids, and other relevant information that the users want.

Another good thing about Cheerio is that it is a free and open-source environment. This means that it is regularly updated by the other developers from the community from which Cheerio comes.

Here are some of the features of Cheerio :

• Cheerio syntax is simple and familiar as it is the subset of the core jQuery library.
• Cheerio is flexible and it is way faster than its competitors and can be used to extract any HTML Or XML.
• The platform does the excellent work of removal of DOM inconsistencies in order to reveal the API.

5. Scraper (Chrome Extension) :

What’s better than Google itself providing a free Chrome extension for web scraping? Before the tool itself, the repetition of Google will come first.

Google is reputed in the field of technology and Customer Management. Hence we can be sure that this web scraping tool is another great service that Google provides.

This is one of the most trusted web scraping tools and is best for those who know a little bit of programming knowledge and also basic Xpath along with jQuery.

With knowledge of basic to medium level of scraping along with the Scraper tool from Google, one can easily extract whatever information he or she wants.

Here are some of the features of Google’s Scraper Web Scraping tool :

• Users with very little and basic knowledge about coding can use this web scraping tool with great ease.
• The scraped data can be extracted easily in the form CSV format with the help of Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
• Since this is a screen text scraping technology, the whole process of selecting the text and then scraping it can be done easily by automating the whole process with the help of Python or Node JS.

6. PySpider :

PySpider is one of the many common web scraping tools which operate on both Python along with Javascript.

The platform comes with in-built result viewers for users who want to monitor the results of their decisions, along with a dashboard and a manager.

The manager is responsible for the management of the entire project that the user is working on.

Here are some of the best features of PySpider :

• In PySpider, the best thing is that debugging is quite easy. This is because there is the presence of a debugger which makes the user quite easily go about his way.
• It has a nice and simple dashboard that can be easily used to monitor the activities of the users by the user itself.
• There are many databases that this platform supports and it includes the likes of MySQL, PostgreSQL, and also MongoDB.

7. Puppeteer :

Puppeteer is another free web scraping tool that works on JavaScript and is designed by the team at Google Chrome.

The tool was released back in the year 2018 and was an instant hit among the users. Its framework comes along with Chromium in the form of a headless browser.

It has performed better than big giants like Phantom JS in terms of speed and efficiency and hence is the favorite of many users.

It is suitable for websites that have heavy JavaScript content and require a browser to execute the JS.

Here are great features of Puppeteer :

• It is quite better at scraping the content of a heavy website with Javascript content that also requires a JS to execute the required task.
• Screenshots can be taken easily.
• Also, there is an option for creating PDFs from the webpages if the users want that.

8. Octoparse :

This platform will allow the users to create upto 10 crawlers for scraping data for free and thereafter, users will have to pay.

But, the best thing that the Octoparse will offer its users is the simple point-and-click user interface which is just great for those users who don’t know anything about programming.

Here are some features of Octoparse that are just great :

• Best for people who don’t have any knowledge of programming but, want to scrape website data.
• It includes the usage of a website parser for those users who think about running their scraping tech in the cloud space.

9. BeautifulSoup

BeautifulSoup is one of those scrapers that have been in the business for a decade and therefore have become the most-known entity in HTML parsing.

It is one of the best web scraping tools that is mostly used for HTML scraping by Python developers.

Unlike platforms like Scrap, this tool has a rather simpler and quiet approach with an interface that is quite basic but, well managed.

A bunch of videos online will tell you how this works. Hence can be said that it is a quite well-documented platform.

Here are the top features of BeautifulSoup :

• It can easily detect the encoding of webpages and hence, it can be said that BeautifulSoup can quite easily scrape information.
• Not much coding is required here as well
• Best platform for beginners.

Remarks From Our Side :

The above web scraping tools are not mentioned according to their relevancy and each tool is said to be amazing by us, at ScrapingPass.

We consider using BeautifulSoup as it is one of the great web scraping tools that are available in the market. They provide the most valid tech in the most trustworthy way that is easy to use and incorporate.

But, in the end, what really is of utmost importance is that the user decides what his or her needs are. Accordingly, the user should choose the product.

It is the great task of any firm to look after their needs and their users and we will help you do the same.