It’s no secret that COVID-19 has accelerated digital transformation, and companies and industries are shifting all their focus towards digital adoption. But if there’s one thing that stands at the heart of digital transformation, it is data.
Ever wonder why something as readily available as data is inaccessible to the majority of the businesses? It is because data available on the web is unstructured and ineffective in providing helpful business insights.
The best way to make data accessible for your organization is through data scraping.
What is data scraping?
Data scraping, commonly referred to as web scraping, is the process of extracting data from websites or various other online sources and importing it into your system. Furthermore, a web scraper can help automate the data scraping or extraction process.
What is a web scraper?
Businesses use web scrapers to make data scraping seamless. Web scraping tools or data scraping tools (as some like to call them) enable companies to access structured data by automating web data extraction.
Although web scraping can be done manually, it is a tedious task and not to mention a time-consuming one. You can use a web scraper instead to simplify and speed up the scraping process and save valuable time and money. In addition, data gathered by a web scraping tool ought to be more accurate than the traditional manual scraping.
Through this blog, we aim at helping you find the right web scraping tool for your business to kick off your digital transformation.
Here’s a list of the best data scraping tools (out of thousands) available on the market. Let’s find the right one for you.
Best data scraping tools
If you are looking for a flexible data scraping tool to automate all your data processes, you won’t need to look any further. Xtract.io offers to help you gather relevant data from a myriad of unstructured sources in a structured format of your choice.
The web scraper is super easy to use and is built using cutting-edge technologies like AI, ML, and NLP. It uses IP rotation proxies to navigate billions of websites and pages to mitigate blocking & sleep time. They have 1000+ cloud IPs for Amazon alone. Moreover, you can easily integrate and store the extracted data by plugging APIs with your internal processes or systems.
Features:
Cloud, SaaS, Web-based
Offers customization
Supports Windows & Mac
Supports on-premise Windows & Linux
Automatic IP rotation
Pre-configured workflows to extract critical data within minutes
Built on technologies like AI, ML, NLP, image recognition, and predictive analytics
Powerful reports and dashboards for analytics
Web Scraper is another effective web scraping tool that can extract data from multiple sites with multiple levels of navigation like categories, subcategories, and product pages. It is built for the latest web and can access websites with JavaScript frameworks. What’s more? You can extract data in any format of your choice and access the data via API or webhooks.
Features:
JavaScript execution
Waiting for Ajax requests
Tailored data extraction
No coding required
Mozenda is a data extraction tool designed for enterprises that want a self-serve cloud-based platform. You can extract text, images, and specific data from web pages. Moreover, the tool assists you with organizing and preparing data files for publishing.
Features:
Extract & publish data to the preferred source
Point-and-click interface
On-premise hosting
Request blocking & job sequencer for real-time data extraction
Import.io is one of the highly recommended web scraping tools in the market. You can use the tool to create datasets by importing the data from target web pages and exporting the extracted data as a CSV file. Also, it allows you to integrate data directly into on-premise systems through powerful APIs
Features:
User friendly
Schedule data scraping
Store & access data on Import.io Cloud
Automate extraction and workflows
Grepsr is a wise choice if you want help with lead generation, pricing and competitive data collection, financial and market data collection, and news aggregation. Analysts, developers, marketers, and data scientists can leverage this web scraping tool to get voluminous, fresh, and clean data in record time. The tool is relatively easy to use right from its setup, dashboard to integration.
Features:
Queue future crawls
API ready
Easy integration — Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, and more
How to determine which web scraping tool will work best for you
But, before you commit to using a web scraping tool for your enterprise or business, you must consider the following aspects:
- Ease of use
- Functionality
- Crawling speed
- Customization
- Data formats supported
- Integration
Final thoughts
We know how taxing it is for enterprises and businesses to pick the best data scraping tool, which champions all the aspects mentioned above. Therefore, the decision to make the shift towards digital transformation is a critical and big one to make.
By choosing the right tool, you can speed up your transformation and, who knows, even emerge as an industry leader!
Originally published at https://xtract.io/blog/top-5-web-scraping-tools/on August 3, 2021. Check out our blog to read more articles and follow us on Twitter or Facebook.
