Information gathered from public sources and websites, also known as Open-source intelligence (OSINT), often plays a vital role in investigations due to it’s capacity to verify information and provide key evidence to support investigations. However, collecting this information can be challenging due to the technical knowledge required to extract data from the web. Analysts can easily find themselves losing many hours simply trying to scrape websites via custom scripts or manual efforts, hours they’d much prefer to spend analyzing information instead. This is where web scraping tools become indispensable, providing the means to scrape and collect data with minimal technical knowledge or setup time.
Web scraping tools typically offer various features such as methods for easily selecting html elements, server-friendly behaviors such as speed throttling, methods for handling proxies and ips, and user friendly UIs. However, these tools usually require a time investment to get the most out of them. Therefore, feature-depth, flexibility of customization, and pricing model should all be considered given your specific needs and requirements.
Below we compare the top web scraping tools, evaluating each based on several criteria: user friendly UI, ability to select page elements, built-in extraction rules, data export flexibility, scalability, and handling of IPS and proxies. By examining the tools across these key aspects, we aim to help you identify the best web scraping tool for your needs, ensuring that you can harvest your data effectively and achieve optimal results in your investigative work.
What are Web scraping tools?
Web scraping tools are pieces of software that allow you to extract and export information from websites. They vary from small programs and APIs which require coding knowledge, through to advanced and flexible solutions for the everyday user without coding knowledge.
The best Web scraping tools
- Sintelix | https://sintelix.com/platform/harvest/
- Crawlbase | https://crawlbase.com/
- Browse.ai | https://www.browse.ai/
- Scrapingbee | https://www.scrapingbee.com/
- ScraperAPI | https://www.scraperapi.com/
- Zyte | https://www.zyte.com/ai-web-scraping/
Key Criteria of web scraping tools
User-friendly UI interface
Web scraping tools should feature a user-friendly UI interface that caters to users of varying technical expertise. The interface should be intuitive, allowing users to easily navigate through the tool’s functionalities, set up scraping tasks, and monitor progress without needing extensive coding knowledge. This accessibility ensures that even non-developers can efficiently extract data from websites, thus broadening the tool’s user base and enhancing overall productivity.
Methods to select web page elements
An essential capability of a web scraping tool is providing flexible methods to select web page elements. This includes point-and-click selection, XPath or CSS selectors, IDs and classses, plus advanced options like regular expressions or other visual selection tools. The aim of these methods is to enable the user to easily identify and target specific data on any webpage, whether it’s a table, text block, or an image. Having robust element selection methods ensures accurate data extraction and reduces the need for manual post-processing.
Built-in extraction rules
A powerful web scraping tool should come equipped with built-in extraction rules to streamline the data collection process. These rules should automatically handle common patterns and structures found on web pages, such as pagination, infinite scrolling, and dynamic content loading via JavaScript. The inclusion of predefined rules helps users quickly set up scraping tasks while ensuring the data is extracted cleanly and efficiently, minimizing the need for custom coding.
Data export
Data export capabilities are a critical feature of any web scraping tool. The tool should offer multiple options for exporting the scraped data in various formats, such as CSV, JSON, Excel, or direct database integration. This flexibility ensures that users can easily integrate the extracted data into their workflows, whether it’s for further analysis, reporting, or feeding into another application. Seamless data export functionality significantly enhances the utility of the scraping tool by making the data immediately usable.
Scalable
Scalability is a key feature for an effective web scraping tool, particularly for users who need to extract large volumes of data or scrape multiple websites simultaneously. The tool should be able to handle increasing workloads efficiently, with capabilities such as task queuing, load balancing, timeouts, pauses, and the ability to run parallel scraping processes. Scalability ensures that the tool can grow with the user’s needs, maintaining performance and reliability even as demands increase.
IPs and proxies
An effective web scraping tool should incorporate some form of IP management and proxy support to help users navigate the challenges of scraping at scale. By allowing the use of rotating IP addresses and proxies, the tool can prevent IP bans and reduce the likelihood of being blocked by websites that detect and limit automated scraping. This feature is crucial for users who need to perform large-scale scraping without interruption, ensuring continuous access to the target data sources while maintaining anonymity.
Top 9 Web scraping tool Comparison
Below we have compared a selection of top tools for web scraping. *Jump to Disclaimer
We have scored each based on the criteria above. See the complete table below:
Sintelix
Pros
- Easy-to-use UI, no coding knowledge required
- Complete web scraping solution
- Highly customisable
- Great support for scraping social media, news sites, and other sources
- Automatically turn scraped data into a knowledge graph as you go, then explore it with sophisticated analysis tools
- No limits on number of requests or bandwidth
Cons
- Sintelix is a comprehensive product with many features, thus can require a time investment to get the most value
Description
Sintelix Harvester provides a powerful and flexible web scraping solution for both harvesting and analyzing information. Via it’s user-friendly UI, you can choose to harvest from a list of URLs, or via a keyword search via popular search engines and other pre-defined sources.
Sintelix Harvester can harvest from many predefined sources, including Telegram, VK, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Medium, Pinterest, Reddit, TikTok, and many more. Harvester also covers the vast majority of news sites and many specialist data sources. When the supported sources change, Sintelix provides rule-set updates to maintain harvesting effectiveness.
Once you have completed a harvest, you can view and analyze the results using various advanced features, such as a Document viewer, table views, or link analysis diagrams. You can also query and search your harvested data with precision via Sintelix’s advanced search, including searching by text, entities (such as people, organisations, places etc.), and even combinations of search methods.
Sintelix Harvester features a “Quick Collect” user interface that allows you to collect information across all sources; you only need to specify keywords and entities of interest. You can constrain collection by search engine, source and region. You can also choose to collect different data from each source.
Sintelix Harvester has many other quality of life features which make it a reliable long-term choice, including:
- Capability to route traffic via your own proxies or third-party proxy services
- No limit on number of requests
- Alerts for entities and keywords
- Schedule recurring harvesting jobs
- Screenshots
- Sintelix Harvester can be run within in almost any computer environment, including Windows, Linux and Docker
- image and video collection and transcription
For a complete overview, see here: https://sintelix.com/platform/harvest/
Sintelix is the only solution out of all options reviewed in this article that does not charge based on the number of requests made, enabling you to scale your scraping operations effectively without unnecessary costs.
Sintelix is a complete solution to your OSINT collection and web harvesting needs. Used in the field by intelligence, defence and law enforcement agencies globally, Sintelix has been continuously developed and improved for over a decade.
Score: 17 / 18
Free Trial: Yes
Price: Request quote: https://sintelix.com/pricing/
Crawlbase
Link: https://crawlbase.com/
Pros
- Good handling of scraping prevention measures
- Proxies included spanning 30 geolocations
Cons
- No UI
- Expensive: Pricing model doesn’t scale well
Description
Crawlbase is a tool designed to optimize web scraping tasks for developers. It requires programming knowledge, however it offers a built-in proxy service, ensuring each request made by the user is sent via a network of proxies in 30 different geolocations. This can be useful when scraping websites with request throttling measures in place, or websites that are blocked in your country.
A standout feature of Crawlbase is its robust attempt at handling common issues that can disrupt web scraping activities, including: blocked requests, proxy failures, IP leaks, browser crashes, and CAPTCHAs. Whilst 100% Captcha solving accuracy isn’t guaranteed, Crawlbase constantly refines its algorithms to avoid bot detection and attempt to solve CAPTCHAs.
Crawlbase offers built-in support for a decent range of websites, including major platforms like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo. It also has good support for dynamically generated JavaScript content. Crawlbase allows users to capture and save screenshots of the web pages they are scraping, providing a visual record of the data collected.
Crawlbase charges per request, starting from $ 0.03 per request, gradually decreasing the price per request as request volume increases.
In summary, Crawlbase is a good solution when attempting to scrape websites that have many scraping prevention measures in place. However, its pricing model makes it an expensive solution at scale.
Score: 12 / 18
Free Trial: Yes
Price: Starting from $ 0.03 per request. See https://crawlbase.com/crawling-api-avoid-captchas-blocks?#pricing
Browse.ai
Link: https://www.browse.ai/
Pros
- Monitor web pages for changes
- Good integration with spreadsheets
Cons
- Convoluted pricing model that is costly at scale
- Creating and maintaining scraping “robots” can be time consuming
Description
Browse.ai is an interesting alternative to traditional scraping tools. The user experience for browse.ai involves training a “robot” to extract information from a given website, setting up scraping rules such as job frequency, then finally selecting from a list of pre-determined output formats and destinations.
Setting up, training and maintaining Browse.ia robots can be time consuming, but they are effective once they’re up and running. Therefore, Browse.ai may be more useful for targeting specific sites that you need to scrape regularly over an extended period.
A useful feature of Browse.ia is its ability to monitor a website for changes. From inspection, it looks like it scans the HTML page searching for page elements that have changed. It’s important to recognize that monitoring a website can be unreliable for numerous reasons, such as: 1. content rendered by dynamic javascript can be hard to detect and handle, 2. various web frameworks or CDNs can alter a page without affecting content, therefore providing false positives. Therefore, before monitoring a specific website it’s important to test that changes are being picked up accurately.
Browse.ai’s strong integration with spreadsheets makes it useful for users who aren’t familiar with working with typical files produced by web scrapers, such as CSV and JSON files.
Browse.ai has quite a complex and potentially confusing pricing model that can be costly, particularly at scale. You are required to purchase credits, which are consumed based on the number of “rows” you scrape. For example, if you had a single page with 50 products, you would use up 5 credits. This is made more convoluted by the fact that you are required to purchase credits as part of a monthly or annual plan and each plan tier has different credit limits. To add further complexity, each tier imposes quite harsh restrictions including maximum number of “robots”, data retention (in days), maximum task execution time of robots and maximum monitor frequency. The net result of this pricing model is that it can be difficult to ensure you are getting value for money and are avoiding paying for credits that you do not end up using
In summary, Browse.ai may be a good option for users that have need to scrape specific websites on an ongoing basis for a short period of time.
Score: 9 / 18
Free Trial: Yes
Price: Starting from $19 per month for 10,000 credits. See https://www.browse.ai/pricing
Scrapingbee
Pros
- Good support for circumventing scraping prevention measures
- Headless browsers and proxies built-in
Cons
- Requires programming knowledge
- Selecting elements to scrape and exporting data must be done manually via a programming language of your choice
Description
Scrapingbee is an API-based solution to web scraping with a focus on circumventing scraping prevention measures put in place by websites and servers. The ScrapingBee’s web scraping API handles headless browsers and rotates proxies for you.
Scrapingbee manages thousands of headless instances using the latest Chrome version so you can avoid outdated and inefficient headless browsers. With websites that use JavaScript rendering, a simple parameter enables you to scrape any web page, even single-page applications using React, AngularJS, Vue.js, or any other libraries.
Scrapingbee has an interesting way to select HTML elements for extraction. After inspecting the target page you wish to scrape and making a list of the relevant classes and IDs, you manually pass those as a parameter as part of the API call, then receive the extracted data in JSON format as part of the response. This approach is effective for websites with a predictable layout, such as a web page that lists blog posts. However, it becomes unwieldy when extracting data from more complex websites.
Scrapingbee does have a no-code option via its “make integration” feature, however it is relatively primitive and limited.
Scrapingbee can be expensive at scale since it is priced per API call.
In summary, Scrapingbee is more suited to programmers and software engineers who want to scrape a handful of websites without having to put the time into circumventing scraping prevention measures.
Score: 10 / 18
Free Trial: Yes
Price: starting from $49 per month for 150,000 API calls https://www.scrapingbee.com/#pricing
ScraperAPI
Pros
- Efficiently handles scraping jobs at scale
- Flexible API
Cons
- Expensive at scale
- Programming knowledge required
Description
ScraperAPI is an enterprise solution for web scraping at scale. Of all the API-only solutions reviewed in this article, scraperAPI may have the best infrastructure to manage multiple concurrent scraping jobs due to how it handles threads and traffic via its proxies. It offers proxies in the US and Europe for normal customers, and additional countries for enterprise customers.
Being an API, ScraperAPI requires technical and programming knowledge to be used effectively. ScraperAPI offers five ways in which you can send GET requests:
- Async Scraper service: http://async.scraperapi.com
- API endpoint: http://api.scraperapi.com
- SDKs (Python, NodeJS, PHP, Ruby, Java)
- Proxy port: Example – http://scraperapi:APIKEY@proxy-server.scraperapi.com:8001
- Structured Data Service: https://api.scraperapi.com/structured/
The Async Scraper endpoint allows you to submit web scraping jobs at scale without setting timeouts or retries, then receive the scraped data directly to your webhook endpoint without polling. This makes your web scrapers more resilient when handling sites with heavy scraping prevention measures in place.
ScraperAPI’s Structured Data Service is their version of pre-defined rulesets for scraping popular sites such as Google, Amazon etc. The idea is to turn each such site into an API endpoint which returns structured data with a simple get() request. They offer the capability to create your own, however this requires coding knowledge.
ScraperAPI’s approach to pricing is per API call, therefore it can be a costly solution at scale.
Score: 12 / 18
Free Trial: Yes
Price: Starting at $49 per month for 100,000 API calls https://www.scraperapi.com/pricing-new-v2/
Zyte
Pros
- Uses AI to help reduce time when selecting HTML page elements
- Good captcha solving
Cons
- AI can be inaccurate and requires manual intervention to get good results
- Built on Scrapy, which can be complex if trying to modify a Zyte scraping project without prior coding knowledge
Description
Zyte is an “AI-powered” web scraping solution that crawls, unblocks and extracts data from websites that features listings; such as events, products, or blogs. It is a very software engineer centric alternative and even features its own Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Therefore, it is not suitable for the everyday user without coding knowledge.
The “AI” applies to its machine learning models which help to identify and select elements on a HTML pages, as well as automate solving captchas. With respect to selecting HTML elements, the AI isn’t always accurate, therefore requires manual review and intervention to get accurate results.
Zyte offers a form-based process to build a spider to crawl each website. You can select from existing templates, such as “e-commerce website”, then select the appropriate crawl strategy with options such as Full, Navigation, and Pagination. After completing the form, Zyte attempts to figure out the elements to scrape, then leaves you to correct any mistakes. Therefore, one must be willing to spend some time tweaking each scraper before getting up and running, especially when scraping lesser-known or more complex websites.
Zyte uses the famous python library Scrapy behind the scenes, so if you are familiar with Scrapy, you have the option to further customise your crawling spiders. It’s worth noting that Zyte is the new version of what used to be Scrapy Cloud.
Zyte adopts a “pay for what you use” pricing model that doesn’t force you into selecting a package, rather offering different pricing per request depending on usage volume and product offering. This approach makes Zyte more cost effective than other solutions that charge per request, however it is still more costly at scale than solutions that do not charge based on requests, such as Sintelix Harvester.
Score: 15 / 18
Free Trial: Yes
Price: Starting at $0.60 per 1000 requests, however pricing alters based on which product you select. See https://www.zyte.com/pricing/
Conclusion
In conclusion, Web scraping tools are invaluable for reducing the workload when building and running web scraping jobs. They help circumvent scraping prevention measures (Captchas, IP bans, etc.), as well as augment and improve your ability to select and capture the data you require from websites. As we have observed, pricing models vary widely amongst the different offerings and should be considered with respect to your scraping needs such as the number of websites you need to scrape, for how long, and the amount of data you aim to extract.
If you would like to learn more about Sintelix Harvester click here.
Appendix
Disclaimer
The comparisons and scoring above represent our own opinion only based on our own research. Great care was taken to respect the terms and conditions of each product, as a result, in some cases the accuracy of our assessment is limited by only what is publicly accessible, which may include product websites, third-party websites, forums and online documentation where available. We have done our best to be as accurate as possible.
