Are you looking for some of the best web scraping software to make a choice and the one to use for your web scraping projects? Then come in now and take a look at our list of top web scraping software in the market.
It is no longer news that the web and mobile platforms are taking center stage as the most popular platforms for application development as more and more people are becoming mobile and embracing the flexibility provided by mobile and web apps. Notwithstanding, desktop applications are still much popular and still have their place. Web scraping desktop applications are some of the popular desktop tools that application users still use. If you are one of the persons that have an interest in using desktop software for web scraping, then this article will list out the top web scrapers available as desktop applications.
You might be wondering why someone at this age will be interested in using a web scraping desktop app when he can make use of cloud-based solutions that are accessible through browsers on any Internet-enabled devices. However, you need to know that desktop applications have their place, and they are not going into oblivion any time soon. This is because they provide the best user experience and are very much responsive compared to their counterparts. The major problem associated with them is that they require installation before usage. If this isn’t a problem for you, then using them isn’t a bad idea.
Below is the best web scraping software you can lay your hands on in the market right now. They are all paid tools but comes with either a one-time free trial option or a free plan with limitations.
Octoparse
- Pricing: Starts at $75 per month
- Free Trials: 14 days of free trial with limitations
- Data Output Format: CSV, Excel, JSON, MySQL, SQLServer
- Supported OS: Windows
Octoparse is a Windows-based software you can use to extract data from web pages on the Internet. With Octoparse, you can convert a full website into a structured spreadsheet of data without writing a single line of code. Octoparse is a visual web scraping tool and, as such, requires you to train it on the data you want to scrape using its point and click interface.
Octoparse is not just one of the best web scraper in the market, but also one of the most advanced you can get in the market. It is easy to use and deals with all kinds of websites, including Ajaxified and other JavaScript feature-rich websites. With this software, you can scrape unlimited numbers of pages effortlessly.
ParseHub
- Pricing: Desktop version is free
- Data Output Format: JSON, Excel
- Supported OS: Windows, Mac, Linux
ParseHub is a web scraping solution provider that provides both a cloud-based web scraper and a desktop application. The desktop software with support for Mac, Windows, and Linux is free to use (with some limitations) and comes with some of the most advanced. ParseHub is built for the modern web and also works with even the most outdated websites. With the ParseHub desktop application, you only need to click on the required data, and the software will scrape related data after training it. ParseHub desktop application is easy to use and also does not require any form of coding skill for you to use.
Helium Scraper
- Pricing: One-time purchase – starts at $99 with 3-month major updates
- Free Trials: Fully functional 10 days trial
- Data Output Format: CSV, Excel
- Supported OS: Windows
Helium Scraper is one of the best web scraping software in the market. It comes with an intuitive point and clicks interface which you are to use for data training so that the software will know the data to scrape. With the interface provided, you can train the software and get it to scrape any data you see on a website. With Helium Scraper, you can build a database of business-related information or a database useful for scientific, academic, or government-related research. It presents a simple workflow for capturing complex data and saving them in popular file formats. Helium Scraper supports fast extraction and scheduling of scraping tasks.
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 OS: Windows, Mac, Linux
Turning unstructured content on web pages into a valuable database has never been easy, but with software such as ScrapeStorm, it becomes easy. Unlike the two scraping software discussed above that are Windows-based, ScrapeStorm was developed for multiple Operating Systems (OS) as it has version each for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Built by an ex-Google crawler team, ScrapeStorm is worth your money, project, and time. The tool is API-powered and requires no coding or manual training of data required as it is done in the above as it automatically identifies the required data points. Interestingly, it supports exporting of data in about 10 file formats and database systems.
FMiner
- Pricing: One-time purchase – starts at $168 with lifetime upgrades
- Free Trials: Free 15 days trial
- Data Output Format: Excel, CSV, SQL database
- Supported OS: Windows, Mac
FMineris available for both Windows and macOS. It presents a simple user interface to its users to make it easy to use. However, it is an advanced scraping tool that incorporates all the anti-scraping tricks to enable you to successfully scrape any website of your choice without experiencing any problem. FMiner presents a visual design tool for training the software on the data that need to be extracted. It requires no coding skills to use, but you will have to take care of Captchas yourself either through using Captcha breakers or solving them yourself manually. This scraping bot is multithreaded and can be used for crawling and scraping multiple pages concurrently.
WebHarvy
- Pricing: One-time purchase – starts at $139 for a single license
- Free Trials: 14 days of free trial with limitations
- Data Output Format: CSV, Excel, XML, JSON, MySQL
- Supported OS: Windows
WebHarvy is incredibly easy to use, and you can start scraping in a matter of a few minutes. WebHarvy supports all kinds of websites and can handle authentication, form submissions, and JavaScript rendering and execution. WebHarvy supports the use of proxies but you have to provide them yourself – it also supports a scheduler for scraping periodically. This tool comes with an intelligent pattern detection system that will scrape data that looked like they belong to the same group. With WebHarvy, you can crawl multiple pages automatically, extract images, and automate browser tasks. It has support for Regular Expressions.
Scrape Box
- Pricing: One-time purchase – $97
- Free Trials: No free trials
- Data Output Format: CSV, Excel
- Supported OS: Windows
Scrape Box is a specialized tool used mostly for SEO-related web scraping tasks. Dubbed the Swiss Army Knife of SEO, Scrape Box is an incredibly useful tool for SEO as it comes with tools such as Search Engine Harvester, Keyword Harvester, Proxy Harvester, Comment Poster, Link Checker, as well many other tools such as Video Downloader, Email Extractor, and Unregistered Domain Finder. Scrape Box is highly customizable and provides support for add-ons. The tool is fast and multithreaded and has proven to provide tremendous value to SEOs. It has support for proxy usage, but you have to provide it yourself. Scrape Box is a paid tool but cheap.
Read more, Why the Harvester on Your ScrapeBox Isn’t Working
Screaming Frog
- Pricing: Starts at $149 per year
- Free Trials: Yes – they have a free plan
- Supported OS: Windows, Mac, Ubuntu
Screaming Frog is a website crawler developed for crawling and provide SEO audits for websites and web pages. The tool analysis website URLs and provides technical audits about its on-site SEO. Screaming Frog has a free trial version as well as paid plans, and it is available on Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu. You might be asking what you need Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool for right? Well, you can use it for finding broken links, analyze page titles and metadata, audit redirects, and discover duplicate contents. You can also use it to generate site maps, extract data with XPath, and review Robots.txt file directives.
Sitebulb
- Pricing: Starts at $75 per month
- Free Trials: 14 days of free trial with limitations
- Data Output Format: PDF
- Supported OS: Windows, Mac
Sitebulb is available on Windows and macOS. It is a powerful URL crawling tool that provides insights into the SEO of pages it crawls and provides actionable recommendations on how to solves issues it discovers. Aside from crawling a page, one of the things you will find interesting about Sitebulb is its beautiful Data VisualizationTool. After each crawling, you can print out flexible PDF reports – and you can decide which part of the report should be included and which is to be left out. You can also compare audits and audit any site regardless of the number of pages it has. Sitebulb can be said to be a competitor of Screaming Frog.
Read more,
- Proxies for Preventing Bans and Captchas When Scraping Google
- The Best Google Proxies for SERP data and Never Get Google Blocked
Outwit Hub
- Pricing: Starts at $69 per month
- Free Trials: Yes
- Data Output Format: CSV, Excel, JSON
- Supported OS: Windows
Outwit Hub has two ready-made scrapers for extracting data from the web. One is a general-purpose web scraping tool, and while the other (Email Sourcer) is a contact scraping tool that does not only scrape emails but also phone numbers. With the scrapers provided by Outwit Hub, one can turn websites into an important database by crawling and extraction specific data from their web pages. Outwit Hub scrapers, just like the others above, is not a free tool but has a limited free trial version you can download and use for limited usage. If you want a tailored made web scraping tool, you can also contact them as they provide such a service too.
Related,
- The Best Web Scraper Chrome Extensions
- Python web scraping library
- Free Web Scraping Software & Extension for Non-programmers
- Best Web Scraping Tools – Ultimate Web Scraper List!
Conclusion
As a way of concluding this blog post, you need to know that each of every one of the tools above requires an Internet connection to function as the whole process of scraping websites requires the tool to go online. While some of the tools above are for SEO purposes, some are general purpose, while others are a little bit specialized. I am sure you will get the best web scraping software for your scraping tasks from the above list.
