10 Best Free Web Scraping Tools for Online Data Extraction

Selecting the right web scraper is an integral step towards hassle-free data extraction and, eventually, reliable insights. In this article, we’ll take a look at 10 best free web scraping tools for online data gathering by reviewing them across a set of important criteria. Let’s get started.

1. Oxylabs Web Scraper API (Free trial)

Oxylabs’ Web Scraper API is one of the most popular web data extraction solutions on the market. It’s designed to collect real-time data from websites at scale and is a great fit for diverse use cases, such as travel fare monitoring, fraud protection, website change monitoring, and more.

• Ease of use: Web Scraper API is an easy-to-use tool which doesn’t require any specific infrastructure or resources from the client’s side. The integration process is straightforward, and the users are always supported with extensive documentation, quick start guides, FAQs, and 24/7 support.

• Scalability: With Oxylabs Web Scraper API, customers are able to build robust and high-performing data gathering infrastructures. It handles large data volumes while also ensuring it’s fresh, accurate, and reliable.

• Data extraction capabilities: Web Scraper API delivers the HTML code of the page. It also leverages the JavaScript rendering feature to retrieve required HTML from websites utilizing JavaScript for dynamic content loading. The Custom Parser feature can also be used to obtain data in JSON format.

• Robustness and reliability: Oxylabs makes sure to constantly maintain and update Web Scraper API’s features and technical capabilities to respond to website changes as well as the evolving needs of their clients.

• Proxy support: We have a premium pool of proxies from 195 countries with ML-driven proxy selection and rotation. No management is needed from the client’s side.

• Support and community: 24/7 customer support available through live chat and email. You can also receive valuable insights through Oxylabs’ GitHub repository, Discord community, blog articles, YouTube tutorials, webinars, and Scraping Experts’ web scraping lessons.

• Performance and speed: Oxylabs ensures near-perfect success rates, response times, and overall fast data retrieval from even the most complex targets. 

• Advanced features: Automatic proxy management, custom parameters, AI-drive fingerprinting, CAPTCHA bypass, JavaScript rendering, Web Crawler, Scheduler, Custom Parser, Headless Browser. 

• Data export formats: JSON, CSV, TXT. 

As mentioned on the official website, ParseHub is a free and powerful web scraping tool. It provides reliable and accurate data extraction capabilities using AJAX technologies, cookies, JavaScript, and more. One of ParseHub’s strengths is its ability to access public data from almost any target hassle-free.

• Ease of use: ParseHub is widely known as a user-friendly tool that doesn’t require any coding skills. What you need to do is simply open a website you’d like to scrape and start clicking on the needed data. The results are then delivered to you in seconds.

• Scalability: While offering both free and paid subscriptions, ParseHub allows for scaling based on customer’s needs and project requirements. The paid plans provide a wider range of advanced features and higher data limits.

• Data extraction capabilities: With ParseHub, users can collect diverse types of public data, such as text, images, attributes, and more. It also allows for the extraction of content that loads AJAX and JavaScript.

• Robustness and reliability: ParseHub is considered to be a reliable web scraping tool. However, users have to always stay aware of their target website’s changes as it may affect ParseHub’s performance. 

• Proxy support: One of ParseHub’s features is automatic IP rotation, which comes in handy when bypassing IP blocks or various anti-scraping restrictions implemented by target websites.

• Support and community: ParseHub offers support through its help center, documentation, and blog tutorials, as well as video guides on how to use the tool successfully. 

• Integration and compatibility: ParseHub allows integration with other tools and services through its API.

• Performance and speed: Many users on various review platforms state that ParseHub is a powerful, easy-to-use, and flexible tool. It provides a possibility to enter thousands of links and keywords that the tool automatically searches through in a short time.

• Advanced features: Scheduled runs, automatic IP rotation, regular expressions, API and web hooks, cloud based, infinite scroll, pagination and navigation.

• Data export formats: API, CSV/Excel, Google Sheets, Tableau.

3. Octoparse

Another popular free web scraper API suitable for non-coders is Octoparse. It’s largely used among researchers, marketers, data analysts, and other professionals due to its intuitive interface and great performance.

• Ease of use: As mentioned above, no coding is needed to successfully use Octoparse. The tool implements a point-and-click interface, so everyone can build a reliable web scraper hassle-free.

• Scalability: Similar to other web scraping tools on the market, Octoparse offers a variety of plans for powerful and scalable web scraping. For example, the free plan for small and simple projects comes with 10 tasks; however, the number of tasks can be increased to 750 and more with the Enterprise Plan to achieve your ultimate scraping goals.

• Data extraction capabilities: Octoparse supports the extraction of various types of data, such as links, text, images, and more. It’s also noted on the Octoparse’s website that it can collect almost any kind of public data as long as you have permission or are not violating any conditions of the website you plan to scrape.

• Robustness and reliability: Reviews on Software Advice indicate that Octoparse is a powerful and reliable tool that can push users' data scraping efforts to the next level. But while the free version works well, some recommend upgrading the plan to allow for the performance of more complicated tasks.

• Proxy support: Octoparse supports the usage of proxies. This is an important feature which can be essential when handling geo-restrictions and avoiding IP blocks. Moreover, it’s fairly easy to configure Octoparse with proxies.

• Support and community: Octoparse’s support team is available via email or through the live chat on their website. They also offer assistance through blog articles, case tutorials, and Octoparse Beginner’s Guide.

• Integration and compatibility: Octoparse allows integration with other tools and services through its API.

• Performance and speed: The efficiency and speed of Octoparse are impacted by elements like the complexity of the scraping task and the characteristics of the target website. Overall, it delivers satisfactory speed for the majority of scraping requirements.

• Advanced features: AI web scraping assistant, 24/7 cloud solution, automatic data export, infinite scroll, AJAX loading, IP rotation, CAPTCHA solving, preset templates to receive data with zero setup. 

• Data export formats: Excel, JASON, CSV, or your own database through APIs.

4. ScrapingBot

ScrapingBot is one of the free web scraping tools that provides numerous different APIs: an e-commerce scraper, search engine scraper, and several social media scrapers. Let’s evaluate ScrapingBot by the very same factors.

• Ease of use: Like we said above, ScrapingBot offers several API solutions for different targets, including e-commerce marketplaces or social media platforms. The process of gathering data with these APIs is pretty straightforward: you submit the target URL and the API returns the data in a structured JSON format. On the other hand, ScrapingBot doesn’t feature a dashboard, where you could track all of our usage statistics, manage your subscription, and such.

• Scalability: ScrapingBot offers five different plans to suit different needs. They offer a free plan with monthly API credits, as well as pay-as-you-go options for scalability. The company puts a lot of emphasis in their communication on transparent pricing with no hidden fees. 

• Data extraction capabilities: ScrapingBot makes it possible to gather the desired information directly from the HTML of the target webpage. With its help you can gather almost any kind of data and use it for such use cases as market research, lead generation, content curation, price monitoring, sentiment analysis.

• Robustness and reliability: Considered to be a reliable and powerful free web scraping service, provides a range of in-built tools and features that make data extraction effortless and efficient.

• Proxy support: The possibility to integrate proxies with ScrapingBot is available.

• Support and community: For additional support with your scraping projects, ScrapingBot offers extensive documentation, blog, and ability to contact the team via email.

• Integration and compatibility: ScrapingBot allows integration with other tools and services through its API.

• Performance and speed: ScrapingBot is generally a well-performing and fast tool. Several user reviews indicate that this tool helps them extract the needed public data with ease, without the need for special expertise.  

• Advanced features: JavaScript rendering, headless proxies and browsers, automatic data delivery, data integration with other tools and platforms.

• Data export formats: TXT, HTML, CSV, Excel.

5. Apify

Quoting Apify itself, it’s the platform where developers build, deploy, and monitor web scraping and browser automation tools. What’s more, it offers a full-stack data extraction solution which allows users to gather almost any kind of publicly-available information on the internet.

• Ease of use: Customer feedback about Apify on review platforms indicates that the tool is very easy to use – it’s flexible yet reliable, has pre-built scrapers, and various integration capabilities.

• Scalability: Apify is well known for its scalability capabilities. It’s powerful enough to meet the ever-changing needs of customers as well as provides additional resources and features for more sophisticated scraping projects.

• Data extraction capabilities: With Apify, users can collect almost any type of data from websites worldwide. It helps to extract public data for lead generation, machine learning, market research, price comparison, sentiment analysis, and more.

• Robustness and reliability: This web scraping tool has a 4.8/5 star rating on the GetApp review platform which proves that Apify is a reliable and trusted tool. Users indicate that while Apify is simple and easy to use, it allows them to extract data from websites at the desired scale.

• Proxy support: Apify offers their own proxy services which allows customers to improve the performance of their web scrapers by rotating IP addresses. Additionally, Apify proxy integration can be performed using other providers, such as Oxylabs.

• Support and community: Apify provides users with an extensive FAQ base that has all the information on getting started with the tool, integrating it with other apps, etc. They also have a support team available via email.

• Integration and compatibility: The web scraper offers the ability to connect with practically any cloud service or web app and make it part of a larger project.

• Performance and speed: User reviews indicate that Apify has excellent performance. However, as with the majority of free scraping tools, it sometimes may fail causing delays in data scraping processes.

• Advanced features: API, auto extraction, data import/expert, data connectors, batch processing, access controls/permissions, AI/Machine Learning.

• Data export formats: JSON, CSV, Excel.

6. Data Scraper

Data Scraper is a data extraction tool that lets users scraper any HTML web page. It’s advertised as a powerful tool for professional data miners.

• Ease of use: Data Scraper is an easy-to-use tool with an intuitive interface and workflow to help you perform advanced data extraction and web crawling. 

• Scalability: With just a few clicks, users have the capability to execute over 60,000 data extraction rules within the tool or create custom extraction rules to access only the required data. Beyond the free play, Data Scraper also offers paid subscriptions with more features and scalability opportunities. 

• Data extraction capabilities: By implementing Data Scraper, you can gather tables and lists from any web page and upload them to Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets. The kinds of data Data Scraper can extract include: search results, products, prices, emails, phone numbers, and more.

• Robustness and reliability: Data Scraper is generally a reliable tool that comes with a wide range of additional features. It allows you to scrape in a safe and secure way without constantly worrying about getting blocked by the target. 

• Proxy support: N/A.

• Support and community: Professional support is available through email.

• Integration and compatibility: N/A.

• Performance and speed: One of Data Scraper's biggest advantages is it’s one click scraping, meaning you can extract the required data in no time and with minimal effort required. 

• Advanced features: Automated crawling of paginated websites, extract tables and lists, automatic navigation to next page, extraction of emails with RegEx, download pages with images. 

• Data export formats: XLS, CSV, XLSX,  TSV.

7. Webscraper.io

Webscraper.io is a tool that offers both a Chrome extension and a cloud extension. With the Chrome extension, you can design a sitemap outlining the website navigation plan and specify the data to be extracted. The cloud extension can extract substantial amounts of data and execute multiple scraping tasks simultaneously.

• Ease of use: Webscraper.io is an easy-to-use web scraper. It has a point-and-click interface which allows for configuring the scraper effortlessly without any coding.

• Scalability: This tool is another example of a web scraper that can perform simple tasks as well as handle more complex projects which require JavaScript execution, multiple levels of navigation, etc. Additionally, users can always upgrade from the free plan to any of the paid subscriptions to get access to even more features.

• Data extraction capabilities: Webscraper.io is implemented by individuals and companies to gather large amounts of publicly-available data. The types of data that it can extract are diverse, starting from text to images and tables.

• Robustness and reliability: After analyzing several review platforms, it should be mentioned that Webcraper.io has a significant percentage of both positive and negative reviews. Therefore, we advise to approach this tool with caution and evaluate its technical capabilities before deciding whether it fits your project needs.

• Proxy support: Webscraper.io does support proxies. By default, the service utilizes IP addresses based in the United States. Alternative location IP addresses can be obtained by reaching out to support. Users on the scale plan have the flexibility to incorporate third-party proxy providers and set up proxy locations according to their requirements.

• Support and community: Webscraper.io offers various knowledge resources, such as blog, documentation, video tutorials, screenshots, forum. You can also contact their support team which is available through email.

• Integration and compatibility: With this web scraping tool, you can manage the scraper and access data via API. Dropbox, Google Sheets, and Amazon S3 are supported.

• Performance and speed: Since Webscraper.io is a basic web scraping tool it has its limitations. Users report ongoing concerns about the speed, occasional crashes, and difficulties when attempting to extract substantial amounts of data or from multiple pages.

• Advanced features: Scheduler, parser, JavaScript rendering, API and webhook access, sitemaps.

• Data export formats: CSV, XSLX, JSON.

8. Scraper

The Scraper extension is a straightforward yet limited data mining tool designed to streamline online research by rapidly converting data into spreadsheet format. 

• Ease of use: Scraper is crafted to be user-friendly for individuals with intermediate to advanced skills comfortable working with XPath.

• Scalability: As mentioned above, Scraper is a simple yet limited data extraction tool. It can transfer  data out of web pages into spreadsheets.

• Data extraction capabilities: This Chrome extension doesn’t support the extraction of various types of data. It’s mainly used to transform data into spreadsheet format.

• Robustness and reliability: The tool has a 3.9 out of 5 score on chrome web store. Many users indicate that Scraper is a simple and easy tool that gets the required job done perfectly.

• Proxy support: N/A.

• Support and community: No instructions on how to use the tool or support are available.

• Integration and compatibility: N/A.

• Performance and speed: The Scraper extension is a great choice if you’re familiar with XPath. However, according to reviews, it has a lot of technical issues and lacks features, which makes it difficult to use it successfully. 

• Advanced features: Copy data to clipboard, added presets, auto-generated XPath, table selector.

9. Scrapy

Scrapy is an open-source and collaborative framework for performing public data gathering from websites in a fast and flexible way. It’s considered to be one of the most powerful libraries for data extraction.

• Ease of use: Scrapy, a Python library widely favored by beginners, offers a robust toolkit for extracting data from websites, thanks to its simplified approach. However, it does require some coding knowledge, so it might not be the best fit for everyone.

• Scalability: Scrapy is an excellent choice for those who are in pursuit of scalable web scraping. With its strong architecture and functionalities, Scrapy enables developers to navigate scalability challenges effortlessly.

• Data extraction capabilities: This web scraping tool provides users with all the necessary tools to effectively retrieve data from any website, process it according to their preferences, and store it in the structure and format of choice.

• Robustness and reliability: Being a free and powerful web scraping tool, Scrapy manages to keep the buzz around it. Its use is fairly streamlined, so developers rely on it to carry out scraping projects at any scale while staying within the budget.

• Proxy support: You can integrate Scrapy with different proxy types. Check out Oxylabs’ Scrapy proxy integration on our website.

• Support and community: Scrapy has in-depth developer-friendly documentation, additional resources (technical articles and blog posts), Scrapy community for support and assistance (GitHub, Reddit, Discord, StackOverflow, Twitter), and FAQ.

• Integration and compatibility: Another advantage of Scrapy is that it allows for integrations and new functionalities easily without having to touch the core.

• Performance and speed: Judging from the users reviews, web scraping with Scrapy is fast and efficient. It’s also robust in handling errors, which means that scraping activities can be performed uninterruptedly.

• Advanced features: Built-in mechanism called Selectors for extracting the data from websites, handles the requests asynchronously, automatically adjusts crawling speed using Auto-throttling mechanism.

• Data export formats: JSON, CSV, XML.

10. Crawlee

Crawlee is a Node.JS package that presents a simple and flexible interface for both web scraping and browser automation. It offers a consistent interface for web crawling through both HTTP and headless browser methods and includes a built-in persistent queue to manage URLs for crawling in either breadth-first or depth-first order.

• Ease of use: Crawlee is a robust and effective tool. It offers a single interface for headless browser crawling and HTTP crawling, which makes it simple to change between the two based on your needs. Check out our Crawlee web scraping tutorial to learn how to use it properly.

• Scalability: Crawlee provides various different options to fine tune the number of parallel requests that need to be sent at the same time, or how many should be performed per minute, and how scaling should work in general based on the available resources.

• Data extraction capabilities: With the help of Crawlee you can efficiently extract almost any kind of publicly-available data including images, screenshots, tables, etc.

• Robustness and reliability: Crawlee is considered to be an effective solution for developers and data analysts who want to automate browser actions and retrieve and extract data effectively. The tool has 4.69 out of 5 stars on Product Hunt and is described as usable and feature-rich.

• Proxy support: A great advantage of Crawlee is that it incorporates built-in support for proxy management. It allows users to quickly choose between a list of proxies to avoid IP-based restrictions or website blocking.

• Support and community: This web scraping tool has its own GitHub repository as well as Discord, Stack Overflow, and Twitter communities for asking questions and providing assistance to fellow developers. 

• Integration and compatibility: Crawlee is compatible with various operating systems and can be integrated with other software and services successfully.

• Performance and speed: Crawlee is a fast tool, capable of handling up to 200 non blocking concurrent requests simultaneously, allowing it to swiftly process and crawl websites. Nevertheless, this high speed has the potential to influence site performance and may result in being blocked. Therefore, it is recommended to exercise crawling in moderation.

• Advanced features: JavaScript and TypeScript, headless browsers, automatic scaling and proxy management, queue and storage.

• Data export formats: JSON, CSV, TXT. 

Web scraper features compared