Web scraping software enables webmasters, bloggers, journalists, and virtual assistants to harvest data from a certain website whether it’s text, numbers, contact details, or images in a structured way. This cannot be done easily through manually copying and pasting due to the large amount of data that needs to be scraped.
Web Scrapers are tools designed to extract/gather data in a website via a crawling engine usually made in Java, Python, Ruby, or other programming languages. Web Scrapers are also called Web Data Extractors, Data Harvesters, or Crawlers, most of which are web-based or can be installed in local desktops. Web scraping software enables webmasters, journalists, bloggers, and virtual assistants to harvest data from a certain website whether the data is text, numbers, images, or contact details in a structured way, which cannot be done easily through manually copying and pasting due to the large amount of data that needs to be scraped.
The Best Web Scraping Softwares
There are hundreds of Web Scrapers today available for both commercial and personal use. Import.io has a great set of web scraping tools that cover all different levels. Below are some other web scraping tools that are available.
Content Grabber
Content Grabber is a cloud-based web scraping software that can perform data extraction. The most notable features of Content Grabber include agent logging, notifications, a customizable user interface, scripting capabilities, scripting, agent debugger, error handling and data export. This is a basic tool that isn’t as robust as other solutions.
80legs
80 legs offers customized web crawling that lets you get very specific about your crawling parameters. You tell 80legs what web pages you want to crawl and what data to collect from those web pages and also the general web crawling which can collect data like web page content, outgoing links, and other data.
ScrapeBox
ScrapeBox is one of the most popular web scraping tools for SEO experts, online marketers, and even spammers. With its very user-friendly interface, you can easily harvest data from a website.
Scrapy
Of course the list would not be complete without Scrapy. It is a fast, high-level screen scraping and web crawling framework, used to crawl websites and extract structured data from their pages. Designed with simplicity, you just write the rules to extract the data from web pages and let Scrapy crawl the entire web site. It’s the latest in a long tradition of tools that lets a user click through the logic of web scraping.
Your main goal is to get the specific images like web backgrounds, buttons, banners, header images and product images which is very useful for web designers.
Import.io
Web Data Integration is a new approach to acquiring and managing web data, focused on data quality and control. WDI allows you to identify, extract, prepare, integrate, and consume web data in minutes.
These are only a few of the best web scraping tools out there, so you’re sure to find one that fits your needs exactly. If you’re an enterprise, we recommend talking to one of our data experts to learn more about how Import.io can help your organization leverage web data.
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