The Best Option – Data Scraping Services Vs. Scraping Tools

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Web scraping is the process of obtaining various unstructured information from any website and turns it into structured, clean data in Excel, CSV, or text format. Some of the popular web scraping uses include:

  • Lead generation,
  • E-commerce data collection,
  • Academic research,
  • Competitor website price tracking,
  • Product catalog scraping, and much more.

People turn to web scraping for all kinds of good reasons and can get pretty confused about which is the best path to follow.

There are two big kinds of providers available in the market when it comes to web scraping, scraping tools providers, and data scraping service providers.

Providers

Product provider refers to the many so-called web scrapers or web extractors. Some products require non-technical users, and some require more programming background (e.g. Scrapy and Content Grabber).

DaaS (Data as Service) is for those running on the service models. Those companies themselves do all the scraping work. They also provide you with the data at any time in any of the formats you want. They will even provide you with weekly / monthly data feeds via API, if necessary.

Some well-known DaaS include Octoparse, Import.io, Web Scraper, etc.

Why Data Scraping Tools?

Data scraping tools automate data gathering on the data. Such apps generally fall into the categories of software you install on your computer or in your computer’s browser (Chrome or Firefox) and self-services.

Web scraping software (free or paid) and self-service websites/applications are a good choice if your data requirements are low and your source websites are limited.

We’ll first give a brief description of the tools in this post. Then, we will provide a quick walkthrough on how these tools work so you can quickly evaluate if they work for you.

Scraping Tools Used for Data Extraction

Below are the scraping tools used for data extraction:

Web Scraper

It’s a standalone chrome extension; Web scraper is a free and easy tool for scraping data from web pages. You can build and check a sitemap using the extension to see how the website should be traversed, and what data should be collected. You can easily navigate the web as you wish with the sitemaps. And, the data can be exported as a CSV later.

Octoparse

Octoparse is an easy to understand, visual scraping tool. The point and click interface allows you to pick the fields from a page quickly you need to scrape. Octoparse can use AJAX, JavaScript, cookies, and so on to handle both static and dynamic websites. The software also provides specialized cloud services allowing you to access large amounts of data. The scraped data can be exported into text, CSV, or XLSX format.

Scrapy

Scrapy is an open-source web scraping application used to create web scrapers in Python. It provides you with all the resources you need to extract data from websites easily, processes it as you wish, and store it in your desired format and layout. It’s built on top of twisted asynchronous networking architecture. This is one of its main advantages. If you have a large web scraping project with great versatility and want to make it as efficient as possible, you should use Scrapy. It can also be used for a variety of purposes, including data extraction and processing, surveillance, and automated testing.

Dexi.io

Dexi (formerly named CloudScrape) allows data extraction from any website and does not require downloading. To scrape information, the software application provides various types of robots. These include Crawlers, Extractors, Autobots, and Pipes. Extractor robots are the most advanced, as they allow you to pick any action that the robot needs to perform, such as clicking buttons and extracting screenshots.

Parsehub

Parsehub is a mobile software available to users of Windows, Mac, and Linux, and it functions as an extension to Firefox. The easy-to-use web software is inbuilt into the browser. Additionally, it has well-written documentation. It has all the advanced features such as pagination, endless page scrolling, pop-ups, and navigation. You can even display the ParseHub data into Tableau.

Scraping Tools and Scraping Services

Among these companies, some companies provide scraping tools and provide scraping services at the same time.

Data services provided by crawler companies can be a lot more cost-efficient. They are much more friendly to one time scrapes. This is true because they have the edge in owning a customizable scraping tool, and only minimum manual intervention will be required.

For data scraping, we have a team of professional and experienced web data scraping experts who are well versed in the latest techniques and methodologies. We act as an extension of your in-house team from India’s state-of-the-art facility. You can connect with them in real-time so that you can get personalized services in a short time.

You can visit our site for consultancy. The link mentioned below:

https://www.loginworks.com/data_services_consulting

When you work with a professional and reliable web scraping service such as Loginworks, you’ll get accurate data to the degree that would make it highly useful for all your intended needs.

Please feel free to share your feedback and valuable comments in the section below.

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