As the old saying says: “Knowledge is Power“. We all know how powerful data could become on the right hands and because of this we strive to obtain it every day, even without realizing we are looking for it.
On a daily basis, we scrape data just by opening our social media accounts, we don’t realize it, as the whole process is conveniently automated and results served instantly, for us to consume them. All of our interests, past purchases, searches made and people we follow, become the criteria to create a path for these amazing scrapers to find more information of interest for us.
Even with a simple Google search, while sipping on on our coffees, we are scraping data and sorting it out from the most to the less relevant, according to G’s algorithm of course.
But what happens when we are the ones scraping and filtering valuable information for ourselves or others? We become the “owners” of a selected data that was completely distorted and now, once filtered and organized, with our own desired details and key points, it gives us amazing insights that can skyrocket any project instantly.
With the evolution of technology, scraping is no longer reserved for the computer savvy, but every one can easily obtain bulk amount of data just with basic knowledge. So we decided to create an updated list of the best scraping companies around based on different aspects and features of each service.
1.- Bright Data (Previously Luminati)
For many years the #1 company within the proxy industry due to its enormous pools, options, and great quality. Just recently added data collection to their arsenal, and honestly, they have a very solid offer filled with features and payment options. This time, with their solutions, Bright Data is aiming at every user type, from total rookies to marketing experts.
It’s also really valuable the immense proxy database (70 million IPs) they offer with their data collection services, a key feature
that becomes a must-have when retrieving huge loads of information.
Main Features:
- Click & Collect
With their Chrome extension, Bright Data offers us the option to scrape data directly from our Chrome browser just by selecting the required information. No prior coding knowledge is required to obtain a huge amount of information with this application. Screening the page, indexing elements and setting up the page hierarchy can be easily done, which are features lacking on most Chrome extensions in the market today.
Customizable templates are also available so we choose the one that fits the most to the job we will be executing. In case the template you are looking for is not available, Bright Data offers the option to create it specifically to fulfill your needs.
For those of us who have some coding knowledge, this is a very straight-forward editor with comprehensive commands to set up your tailored crawler. Within minutes a custom crawler can be created with scheduling options like Frequency, Collection Window, and Delivery time.
We have all had this specific website which gives us a hard time and even with the best proxies we cannot pass through and get our valuable data. This software was created to retrieve data with 100% success rate, taking into consideration all variables that could decline our access while scraping. Data Unblocker offers IP priming and cookie management, Browser Fingerprint Imitation, Automatic IP selection, Content Validation, Captcha Solving, Geo-Targeted Solutions, Unlimited Concurrent Connections, Asynchronous requests for chosen domain and is compatible with existing code.
We could say Bright Data actually did their job on investigating the current flaws and main concerns within Data Scraping industry and created a solution targeting all of them.
In regards to pricing, they offer quite a lot of options. Monthly and yearly options are available as well as a Pay-As-You-Go option that charges us based on the CPM of data extracted. At the moment their Pay-AS-You-Go option has a price of $5.00 per 1000 page loads, which is a really motivating price to test their services. The longer your subscription is and/or the higher the total page loads requested is, the CPM goes even lower, going even down to $1.05/1,000 requested pages when subscribing for the 20M page loads per month. Huge deal for those bulk scrapers out there.
Overall a very stuffed offer from a reputable company which is already providing solutions to the main drawbacks we had. We truly hope others start replicating their solution, as we as the final users, are the ones benefitting the most from it.
2.- SerpApi
This is a very interesting service and made its name within the top scraping companies mostly because of their robust platform and attention to details.
SerpApi offers multiple dedicated APIs for a wide range of scraping jobs, a large and comprehensive documentation and a really easy integration method. These APIs deliver rich results from all of the search engines you know like Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Baidu, Yandex and more. You can check out the documentation for the Google Search API and all the others here: https://serpapi.com/search-api
They also don’t just stop with the base Google search engine. SerpApi covers all of the specifics like their Google Maps Search API , Google Shopping API , Google Scholar API and so much more. SerpApi’s goal is to make sure their users can scrape all of the specific services their users need data from.
SerpApi has even gone as far as building an API to scrape YouTube search with their YouTube Search API, something that’s very impressive considering how important the video streaming platform has become over the past decades. SerpApi also built APIs for Walmart’s product search, Home Depot as well as eBay and is only looking to expand further into scraping more search engines.
SerpApi’s team strongly believes in transparency therefore they offer a unique in the industry Legal US Shield based on the first Amendment of the United States Constitution. This allows users to parse data making double sure that these activities remain legit under the eyes of the law.
In regards to features, SerpApi is filled with them. From geolocated encrypted parameters to retrieve data exclusively from a specific country or region to a vast language library to please even the most specific use cases.
Results are fetched in the JSON format with both organic and ad results from maps, stories, graphs and shopping data. SerpApi also supplies users with the raw HTML files for use too!
SerpApi helps collect data on multiple scenarios like:
- SEO
- Local SEO
- Data and News Monitoring
- Background Checks
- AI Models and Machine Learning
- Voice Assistants
Their official plans start with 5,000 successful searches and go all the way up to 4,000,000 successful searches as month-to-month subscriptions which we found to be very reasonable based on the amount of quality and geolocated data that they let us retrieve. If you are looking for higher volumes per month or additional features SerpApi’s team is open to work on a custom solution so don’t hesitate to reach out to them.
If you are looking to test their services, they offer a really generous free trial of 15 days with 5,000 successful searches.
3.- Nimbleway
A really versatile tool that simplifies data collection right from the very beginning.
Nimbleway is dedicated to collecting data and providing a very impressive pool of proxies to perform almost any task with zero roadblocks in the process.
Their data collection offer is enhanced to be self-sufficient as only the first configuration steps are required, without coding, to build a series of pipelines that will make the heavy lifting for you.
This service lets you – set up and forget – your requirements and keep receiving data-driven results on your most preferred period or date without any type of maintenance. Data can be conveniently sent on batches, synchronously, asynchronously, even to cloud storage buckets like Amazon S3 or Google Cloud, how cool is that!?
APIs are easily configurable and out-perform many competitors on the market. They focus on SERP, Ecommerce and Web Data Collection, so using the right API template brings enhanced results. Plenty of documentation is served to make it even easier to integrate.
Nimbleway also offers their Nimble Browser, a tool that gives all the benefits of a headless browser while letting you manage all TLS fingerprints, cookies, canvas checking and more. A really convenient way of scraping the web and can be easily integrated to many browser automation frameworks like Selenium, Playwright, Puppeteer, among others.
Their pricing is divided in 4 categories: Essentials, Advanced, Professional and Enterprise, being Professional our preferred one as it is where the unlimited concurrent requests are granted. Still, it is up to each user’s requirements, the most suitable plan to choose.
Each plan will credit points equal to the dollar amount spent purchasing it and those are consumed based on the API/Browser requests and /or Proxy traffic data used.
We describe this service as a very complete solution for all scraping needs.
Don’t forget to request a free trial by contacting their sales team!
4.- Prowebscraper
Amazing tool for basically everyone. It has an online and very intuitive user interface with a bunch of useful tools to make your scraping even more efficient, like:
- Pagination
Easily extract data from multiple pages.
- Chaining
Grabs all data. Pages directing to additional pages with information of interest. All will be scrapped.
- Point and Click Selector
As the title implies. Just need to select the desired data with your mouse and the scraper will do the rest.
- Scheduler
Lets you schedule your data scraping job for a specific day or time. We all know everything has a rush hour, even data.
Those are just to name a few, but this tool actually has some more interesting features like Access data via API, URL Generator and the option to download data in multiple formats like JSON, CSV, Excel, XMl and more.
Their price is based on the number of pages you will scraping, going from 5,000 pages per month to 500,000 pages per month.
If not ready to purchase yet, they offer a free no-credit-card-required 100 page-scrape to test their services and decide if they are really worth it. Go try it!
5.- Octoparse
This is another no-coding-required scrapping service with tons of features to offer to their users.
First of all, by the time I am writing this article, this service is only offered via a desktop application for Windows users only. So, if you are running any other OS on your computer, this is not for you. Yeah, I know some of you won’t be stopped by this 😉
This service offers cloud services, with unlimited storage, to keep and access your valuable data right away as well as the option to store it locally.
Main features we could find at Octoparse:
- Point and Click Interface
Really user-friendly, especially for the new ones that stay away from coding at all expenses.
- Professional Data Services
If you don’t want to do it, yes, they do it for you.
- Wide Website Compatibility
Octoparse will deal with the most defying website. Javascript, AJAX, or dynamic websites will not be deal-breakers anymore.
- Automatic IP Rotation
Hundreds of cloud servers support Octoparse with unique IP addresses minimizing the risk of being traced and blocked while running a task.
Their prices are really acceptable but based on the crawlers to use instead of the pages to scrape. In other words there are no limits of pages to scrape but crawlers to scrape those pages. As they define it, a crawler is a set of configurations to crawl any website.
You can also test these services totally for free, without any credit card requirement, and without a limit of pages to crawl. Just consider your test account will have max 10 crawlers and 2 concurrent local runs. Cloud extraction is not permitted under the free scheme.
Just keep in mind, due to their multiple scraping options and features, you could face a steep learning curve if you are not familiar with it.
6.- Zyte (Previously Scrapinghub)
Scrapinghub, now called Zyte, is a very well known company with more than 10 years providing data collection services within the scrapping industry.
With the recent name change, a vast amount of updates and new services came along with it.
The Zyte team compiled all the requirements to perform a fast and efficient data scrape, all in the same place, with features like Smart Proxy Management, dedicated to rotating IPs trough out the whole scraping process preventing bans and obtaining the right results every time and Splash Headless Browser to provide smooth scraping even through the heaviest JavaScript websites.
They also offer tons of open source tools like:
- Scrapy
A very powerful Python-based framework to help you build your scrapers.
- Portia
Noobie proof tool for building spiders through a visual and friendly interface.
- Frontera
Framework for managing crawl logic and policies.
- W3lib
Provides a ton of useful web-related functions for most web scraping needs.
Their prices are really acceptable depending on every user’s need, but they might skyrocket at the exact moment your requirements start to increase and/or the level of detail and effectiveness of your project becomes a must. You might try their 14-day trial with 10k requests max and see how it goes for you.
Plenty of use cases are available to showcase what this tool is capable of.
Overall a good company with respectable of solutions that firmly stood over time.
7.- Webscraper.io
An amazing Chrome Extension created just to make scraping as simple as possible, open-source and totally free for local scraping.
It contains some interesting features like:
- Point and Click Interface
- Dynamic website data extraction capabilities.
- Modular Selector System
- Multiple formats to export data. (CSV, XLSX, JSON)
A vast amount of users feel really comfortable with this service, as it runs directly from your browser, could be Chrome or Firefox with multiple built-in options like Scheduler, API, and Proxy.
They also offer a cloud-stored scraping service with the same features as the Chrome/Firefox extension and multiple tutorials available which makes it really easy for anyone to dominate this tool.
Even though they offer a really good solution it’s still not perfect as because of its simplicity some valuable topics were left behind, like form filling or IP rotation.
Anyways, as an entry point to the world of scraping this is a perfect solution, with a free plan to test their services (local only) and affordable prices for higher volumes.
8.- Data Miner.io
This is another Chrome extension, but a very popular one, as it’s full of features.
As we all know, extensions might be really popular because of their simplicity which makes every user capable of obtaining tons of data in a matter of seconds. And best of all, its starter plan is
totally free!
Their user interface is really straight forward which makes this tool, if not the most, one of the easier ones to use with powerful features like:
- 1 Click Scraping
- Dynamic Ajax Content Capabilities
- Auto Form Filling
- Paginated Results
- Javascrips API hooks
- Tables and Lists Scraping
- Behind a Login Scrape
- URLs List Scraping
One of the favorite features Data Miner users like, is the option to select the best already created recipe for your required task so no time needs to be spent creating your own.
With the Free Plan, you will get 500 pages/month which resets every month, next pagination, and the use of public/your own recipes.
Just be aware of now exceeding the 500 pages limit per month, as doing so, will block your account and a paid plan will need to be purchased to unlock it. Keep it low to keep it free!
9.- Dexi.io
Has earned its name within the scraping companies due to it’s flexible and powerful platform.
With Dexi the creation of crawlers, pipes and extractors is really straight forward as they offer custom support for their users where robots are crafted by their in-house specialists and attached to the customer’s account when completed.
They specialize in e-commerce data collection and offer multiple advanced features like:
- Dynamic BI Dashboard
- Store / Product locator
- Retail Analytics
- Product Intelligence
- Channel Performance
- Dynamic Pricing Alerts
This service really goes above and beyond for their customers as they offer 24/7 alerts both ways, to the user and to their support team in case something affects the robots. Full customization available for any of the users requirements like data quality checking and normalization and verification against target data points.
If you choose an Enterprise Plan, Dexi will assign a dedicated account manager to your account which will be in charge of delivering your robots, integrations and data outputs. This is actually really useful as their platform requires time and patience to overcome the learning curve.
Their prices are based on the number of concurrent jobs required. Depending on the needs and volume required this solution might get really pricey in a matter of a few concurrent tasks.
10.- ScrapeBox
They call themselves “The Swiss Army Knife of SEO” and we do agree they have plenty of really useful SEO features. But, are they a solid scraping tool? Let’s see.
In fact, Scrapebox is packed with so many different tools to work SEO with, that because of it, it doesn’t rank as a solid option just for data collection, but as an SEO-focused one.
Scrapebox is a desktop software, so you got to run it on a local machine. Because of this, it’s restricted to the processing power and operation time of your rig. You can always get yourself a good VPS and just keep it running.
Some of the main features Scrapebox offers are:
- SERP Scraping
- Keyword Scraper
- Proxy Harvester
- Email Scraper
- RSS Feed Creator
- Youtube Downloader
- Name and Email Generator
- Bulk Image Downloader
Many factors come to play in order for us to obtain, fast, trustable, and budget-appealing results. The evolution of data scraping is just starting. Day by day the efforts invested in this industry are bigger and with tech always evolving around it, we can rest assured that well-structured and valuable data will always stay a few clicks away from us.
