Are you looking for the best alternatives to Octoparse for web scraping? Fortunately for you, there are many good alternatives around that require no coding skills. The article below will reveal them.
The importance of web scraping is no longer questionable in today’s world where businesses, companies, and investment institutions have integrated the data-driven approach into many of their workflows.
However, the way the data is collected and the tool used differs depending on expertise, budget, and personal preference. In the past, only programmers are able to scrape data from the Internet as there are no already-made web scrapers developed to do that. The story is no longer the same as there are already-made web scrapers developed for non-coders to use which does not require a single line of code.
Octoparse is one of the web scrapers that has been developed for non-coders to use. The tool is quite easy to use and gets the job done in no time. However, it is not a tool for everyone.
There are some people that like it why others are yawning for certain the feature that it lacks but is likely to be available in other web scrapers of its kind. If you are one of the professionals that need an alternative to Octoparse, then you are on the right page as we would be providing you recommendations on the best alternatives to Octoparse in the market that you can use.
Brief Octoparse Review
Octoparse makes web scraping easy for everyone by taking away the complexities.
Octoparse Pros
With this tool, you can convert a website into a spreadsheet without writing a single line of code.
The web scraper can be defined as a visual web scraper that provides you an easy-to-use point and clicks interface for selecting some of the data of interest while the tool identifies similar elements.
Octoparse is an advanced web scraper and can be used to scrape all kinds of web pages includes Ajaxified websites, has support for scheduled scraping, supports IP rotation to avoid blocks, and even has a cloud-based scraping platform that makes it easy for you to scrape 24/7 without the need of keeping your PC on.
Octoparse supports both Mac and Windows and has got a good number of people using it as their web scraper of choice.
Octoparse Cons
It might interest you to know that even with the flaw-less like features the tool comes with, it does have its downsides and reasons people would want to look out for an alternative.
Why Use an Octoparse Alternative?
Let take a look at some of the reasons you will want to make use of an alternative web scraper instead of Octoparse.
-
Setup Takes Some Times and Can Still Be Technical
You already know that you do not require to write or understand a single line of code before using Octoparse. This does not take away all of the complexities. The easy-to-use interface provided for pointing and clicking elements/data of interest is not as easy as it should be for non-technical users. Some are looking for an easier tool. For others, they just feel the setup time is a little longer than expected.
-
Does Not Support Image Download
Are you looking forward to downloading imaging from your web pages of interest? Then Octoparse is not the tool for you. Currently, Octoparse can only scrape the image URLs but not download them for you locally as you click on them. Fortunately for us, there are some web scrapers that have the capabilities of doing this.
-
Octoparse is Paid
Of course, you should pay for the software you use and do not expect them to be offered to you for free after the amount of work put together in the development and marketing. For this reason, I do not see this as a downside. However, there are many people that cannot afford to pay for a web scraper considering the fact that after paying for Octoparse, you will also need to buy proxies separately. For these sets of people, there are alternatives they can use that are free to use.
Best Octoparse Alternatives in the Market
In this section of the article, we would be providing you with the alternatives in the market that you can use. It is important you know that none of the tools described below is the tool for everyone just like Octoparse as each of them has got its cons too.
Data Collector by Bright Data
- Pricing: Starts at $350 for 100K page loads
- Free Trials: Available
- Data Output Format: Excel
- Supported Platforms: web-based
Bright Data is known as a market leader in the proxy market. It recently launched a web-based web scraper known as Data Collector that placed it strategically as a data provider. Data Collector is one of the easiest tools to use for web data extraction as not only does it not require coding but also does not take you through the stress of pointing and clicking as in the case of Octoparse.
It provides structured data for many of the popular web services that cut across social media, e-commerce, property listing, and price aggregators, and hospitality, among others. With this tool, you also do not need to deal with the use of proxies or avoid getting blocked.
The tool also has a pre-scraped dataset for some of the web services its supports. Data Collector is a paid tool and you can choose to pay based on the Pay-As-You-Go model or on a monthly basis.
ScrapeStorm
- Pricing: Starts at $49.99 per month
- Free Trials: Starter plan is free – comes with limitations
- Data Output Format: TXT, CSV, Excel, JSON, MySQL, Google Sheets, etc.
- Supported Platforms: Desktop, Cloud
ScrapeStorm can also be said to be one of the best alternatives to Octoparse because of some of the features that the Octoparse tool lacks. It is also a visual scraping tool that provides users with a simple point and clicks interface. However, ScrapeStorm is an AI-powered web scraper that reduces manual operation in terms of using the point and click interface provided.
Because of the intelligent nature of the tool, it can automatically identify the data and element of interest on a page in which case, you will not need to use the point and click interface. ScrapeStorm also does have to support Linux in addition to Mac and windows that Octoparse has. This tool is also paid and requires you to set up proxies to avoid getting blocked.
WebScraper.io Extension
- Pricing: Freemium
- Free Trials: Freemium
- Data Output Format: CSV, XLSX, and JSON
- Supported Platform: Browser extension (Chrome and Firefox)
WebScraper.io browser extension is one of the best visual scraping tools you can use to scrape websites. This tool just like the others above is not built for any specific website. It is a general web scraper that has been developed for scraping all website including modern websites that acts as an application (Single Page Website (SPAs).
This web scraper is available as a Chrome extension which makes it possible for you on platforms that the Octoparse does not support. Another thing you will come to like about the webscraper.io tool is that it is provided for free which makes it the tool for those without a budget for a web scraper.
WebHarvy
- Pricing: Starts at $139 for a single user license
- Free Trials: Not available
- Data Output Format: TXT, CSV, Excel, JSON, XML. TSV, etc.
- Supported Platforms: Desktop
WebHarvy is another alternative for Octoparse which you can use to scrape data from any web page on the Internet. I would say WebHarvy is everything Octoparse and much more. Remember we stated that Octoparse does not have support for scraping images? Well, WebHarvy does that effortlessly. Aside from images and text, WebHarvy also does have support for scraping emails, and HTML.
One other feature you will find interesting is its support for Regular Expression (Regex), which make it possible for scraping textual data that match certain pattern deep within a text such as a date, emails, etc. WebHarvy is a powerful web scraper yet simple to use even for first-time users. It also comes with an intelligent pattern detection that identifies similar elements on a page and does support a good number of export formats.
ScrapeBox
- Pricing: Starts at a $197 one-time purchase
- Free Trials: Not available
- Data Output Format: CSV, Excel
- Supported Platforms: Windows and Mac
All of the web scrapers described above are not specialized in terms of usage. If you are into SEO and looking for an Octoparse alternative that is more tuned for SEO then ScrapeBox is the tool for you. Nicknamed the Swiss Army knife of SEO, ScrapeBox is one of the most powerful SEO scraping tools.
This tool is highly customizable, allowing you to use already-made addons and you can also develop yours too. ScrapeBox comes with a good number of web scrapes including a search engine harvester for scraping keyword and ranking data from popular search engines including Google snd Bing, a proxy harvester for scraping free proxies for you, and a backlink checker. ScrapeBox is one of the tested and trusted solutions in the market that has been around since 2009.
Import.io Web Extraction
- Pricing: Custom quote
- Free Trials: 30-days free limited plan available
- Data Output Format: CSV, JSON
- Supported Platforms: Cloud
import.io is an enterprise-grade service that has been set up to collect data at any scale. It is a complete data collection tool that does not only collect data from the Internet but also detect anomalies in data, validate rules, and is quite reliable in terms of timing. This service is a tool that can be likened to Octoparse.
This tool is known as the import.io Web Extraction tool and you can use it to convert a website into structured usable data. This tool comes with some features you will not find in Octoparse which include downloading images, saving data in a specific data type, automatic data of interest detection, and even respect for Robots.txt, among others. This tool is quite powerful, providing you the ability to scrape multiple pages, generate URLs, train multiple URLs, extract details, and list pages, among others.
ParseHub
- Pricing: Free with a paid plan
- Free Trials: Free – advance features come at an extra cost
- Data Output Format: Excel, JSON,
- Supported Platform: Cloud, Desktop
ParseHub is another web scraper that can be said to be a worthy alternative to Octoparse when you consider some of the pecks it comes with. The number one peck is that aside from the full-featured version, there is a strip-down version available that is provided for free which makes it the tool of choice if you want to avoid paying for a web scraper.
However, you will still need to spend on proxies. ParseHub is quite easy to use snd looks simple on the surface but quite powerful. With Parsehub, you can scrape any interactive website as it has support for scraping Javascript-heavy pages. Aside from exporting the data either in excel or JSON, ParseHub also has support for importing the data you scrape into Google Sheets and Tableau.
Helium Scraper
- Pricing: Starts at a $99 one-time purchase
- Free Trials: 10 days free
- Data Output Format: CSV, Excel, JSON, SQLite, etc.
- Supported Platforms: Desktop
Helium Scraper is a powerful web scraper that comes with a good number of features that aren’t available in Octoparse yet. It is a multithreaded web scraper that provides you with an easy-to-use point and click interface. It is super fast as web data extraction and could be used to capture complex data.
Helium Scraper is quite fast because of some methods it uses with one of them being the act of blocking images and video so that the page would only load the required text which makes it faster than when all of the page resources would be loaded.
Helium Scraper has support for Big Data as it uses SQLite which can hold up to 140 terabytes of data. It does support SQL database generation and manipulation.
Payment is ones and you can use it forever just like in the case of Webharvy.
Apify
- Pricing: Starts at $49 per month for 100 Actor compute units
- Free Trials: Starter plan comes with 10 Actor compute units
- Data Output Format: JSON
- Supported OS: Cloud-based – accessed via API
All of the above web scrapers are already-made web scrapers meant for non-coders. If you are a coder but you are looking for an already-made scraper that you can integrate into your code, then Apify is here for you. Apify is an automation platform that has been developed to provide Node developers with already-made automation tools with scrapers being some of the most supported.
Aside from the web scrapers which are known as actors on the platform which are provided by Apify, there are other third-party actors supported. From this platform, you can get scrapers for most of the popular websites on the Internet. Aside from web scrapers and other bots, this service also sells proxies.
ScrapingBee
- Pricing: Starts at $49 monthly for 100K API credits
- Free Trials: 1K free API calls
- Data Output Format: JSON
- Supported Platforms: Web API
ScrapingBee is different from the other tools described above including Octoparse but does have features that make it a good alternative especially if you are a coder. ScrapingBee is basically a proxy API that would prevent IP-based blocks when you are scraping the Internet. It also handles headless browsers for you.
It is the tool to use if you keep getting blocked while scraping data from the Internet even when you have proxies configured. The feature that makes it an alternative to Octoparse is its support for an Extraction API which is available for some of the programming languages which does not return the full HTML of a web page, but the structured data you are interested in. For this to work, you will need to install the scraping bee library.
FAQs About Octoparse
-
Is Octoparse Safe to Use?
The Octoparse tool is safe to use even for websites that require login. Installing its application would cause no damage to your computer and the software has not been discovered to act as malware. For this reason, it is safe to have it installed on your computer without worrying about any negative consequences.
-
Octoparse Tutorials (How to use Octoparse)
As stated earlier, Octoparse is not a difficult tool to use. The only skill you need is to be computer literate and know how to use the mouse or trackpad of your laptop. You can read this guide provided on the Octoparse blog to learn how to use the tool for web data extraction.
If you are looking for a video tutorial on how to use the Octoparse tool, then you can check out this video tutorial provided by Octoparse on how to scrape Amazon using the Octoparse.
-
Does Octoparse have an API?
Yes, there is an Octoparse API provided for those with standard and professional accounts. This API I meant for retrieving scrapped data, controlling tasks, and getting tasks information. Read the Octoparse API documentation to learn how to make use of it effectively.
Conclusion
From the above, you can see that there are many alternatives available to you if you do not want to make use of Octoparse. It is important I stress here again that each of the tools described above all does have its own downsides and the Octoparse tool is not a bad web scraper. In fact, from our research, it is one of the best web scrapers out there that you can use for web data extraction especially if you do not have coding skills.
