Top 5 Instant Data Scrapers for 2024

Writing code to scrape the web can be time-consuming, requires web scraping skills, and comes with numerous limitations, such as website changes, CAPTCHAs, and many others.

The good news is that you don’t have to write and maintain your own scraper; there are several instant data scrapers you can implement instead. In this article, you’ll compare five of the most popular instant data scrapers. You’ll look at their features, usage, pros and cons, ease of use, and cost. By the end of the article, you’ll have a better idea of which instant data scraper is best for your use case.

In the following sections, you’ll compare the Bright Data Web Scraper API, ScraperAPI DataPipeline, Octoparse, Apify Web Scraper, and Data Miner.

Let’s jump right in.

Bright Data Web Scraper API

The Bright Data Web Scraper API is one of the most sophisticated and easy-to-use scrapers out there. It’s a cloud-based solution that can scrape data from a web page and return it in a structured format, regardless of the anti-scraping mechanisms the target website may employ:

Here’s a quick overview of what the Bright Data Web Scraper API offers:

Bright Data’s Web Scraper APIs make extracting data from the web extremely simple. There are APIs available for numerous websites, including popular domains such as Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and eBay. These APIs help you collect all the data points commonly scraped from a website. For instance, the YouTube Scraper API allows you to quickly extract video titles, descriptions, comments, and view counts, while the Instagram Scraper API lets you gather followers, photos, comments, and numerous other data points from an Instagram profile. You can then export this data in various formats including JSON, NDJSON, or CSV.

Using the Web Scraper API is straightforward with the help of Bright Data’s control panel. The user-friendly dashboard and extensive documentation make setting up and using the APIs easy.

In addition to its simplicity, another advantage of the Bright Data Web Scraper API is its scalability. Even as your data scraping needs grow, the Web Scraper API can scale your scrapers without a drop in performance. The performance is consistently optimal, with the number of failures being reduced to the absolute minimum. The Bright Data proxy infrastructure is unparalleled, with access to more than 72 million real user IPs across virtually all countries in the world and with a 99.99 percent uptime. And if you run into any issues, the company offers 24/7 live support.

The Bright Data Web Scraper API comes with all the features you’d expect in a top instant data scraper, such as automatic IP rotation, user agent rotation, and CAPTCHA solvers. In addition, Bright Data is 100 percent compliant, leading the industry in this aspect, as its practices comply with different data protection laws, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

Bright Data’s Web Scraper APIs pricing depends on the number of records and the domain type, starting from $0.001 per record. You can opt for a pay-as-you-go plan, and a free trial is available, allowing you to test the Web Scraper APIs without any charge to ensure they meet your needs.

ScraperAPI DataPipeline

The ScraperAPI DataPipeline is currently one of the most popular data scrapers. Its popularity partly stems from the fact that it’s a very low-code solution, making it great for those who want to scrape but aren’t very experienced with coding.

All it takes is a few clicks, and you can collect large amounts of data (up to 10,000 URLs per project). It’s also fast, and you get your data in a few minutes:

Here’s a brief overview of ScraperAPI DataPipeline’s pros and cons:

ScraperAPI offers ready-to-use templates that let you collect structured data from some of the largest websites on the internet, including Amazon, Google, and Walmart, in JSON, an easy-to-use format. Additionally, if those companies make changes to their websites, ScraperAPI can handle that challenge and still collect the necessary data.

Even if the templates don’t fulfill all your scraping needs, ScraperAPI is highly flexible and allows you to customize your scrapers. It’s also highly scalable, as it uses many concurrent threads, allowing it to perform large scraping tasks quickly. If scalability is important to you, you may want to consider the ScraperAPI DataPipeline.

Some of ScraperAPI’s most notable features include proxy rotation, CAPTCHA handling, automated retries, geotargeting, and bypassing anti-scraping mechanisms set by target websites.

Keep in mind that the ScraperAPI DataPipeline has a few drawbacks. First, it’s costly. Its cheapest premium plan costs $49 USD a month and includes a limited number of API credits. This plan also doesn’t provide worldwide geotargeting. ScraperAPI’s most popular plan, and the one best suited for businesses, is significantly more expensive, costing $299 USD a month.

Second, even though ScraperAPI is considered low code, their DataPipeline still requires more technical knowledge compared to some of the other data scrapers reviewed here and is, therefore, not recommended for beginners.

Octoparse

Octoparse is a desktop software that doesn’t require any coding knowledge to scrape websites. It’s a visual web scraper utilizing a point-and-click system, making it easy to use even if you’ve never scraped websites or written code before:

Let’s take a quick look at what Octoparse offers:

One of Octoparse’s most useful features is its template gallery. This library includes preset templates for some of the most popular websites on the internet, allowing you to get data in seconds. For example, you can easily scrape LinkedIn’s job listings (and get details, such as the job title, company, and job description), Amazon’s products, or all tweets from a certain X (formerly Twitter) account.

Even if there isn’t a template for your particular use case, it’s easy to create and customize your scrapers. Using Octoparse’s visual operation pane, you can open web pages, log into accounts, and enter text. You can also export the data you scrape into several different formats, such as CSV, HTML, XLSX, and TXT.

In addition, Octoparse allows you to schedule your scrapers as its cloud solution is available 24/7. Other features include proxies, CAPTCHA solving, IP rotation, infinite scrolling, automatic data export, and OpenAPI support.

Despite its advantages, Octoparse also comes with a few flaws. Similar to ScraperAPI, it’s relatively expensive. Its free plan is very limited and is best suited for testing the tool before purchasing. The standard plan of Octoparse costs $89 USD a month, and the professional plan costs $249 USD a month. However, the biggest issue with Octoparse is that it utilizes a credit system for premium templates, proxies, and the CAPTCHA solver. The costs for these features can quickly rack up.

Apify Web Scraper

Apify is another solution that facilitates web scraping. It doesn’t require significant coding skills, and it comes with an easy-to-use interface, which is one of its significant advantages. Just like ScraperAPI and Octoparse, Apify enables you to schedule your scrapers:

Here’s a quick overview of Apify Web Scraper’s pros and cons:

Another good thing about Apify is that it comes with nearly 2,000 prebuilt Actors, which are essentially code templates you can use to quickly set up a scraping task. Currently, some Actors allow you to easily scrape Google search results, YouTube, Amazon products, Instagram hashtags, Facebook posts, and much more.

One of the main Actors is the Apify Web Scraper, which is Apify’s basic tool for web scraping. With Web Scraper, you can provide any website, and the tool will scrape that website.

With Apify, you can also write your own code using any framework that suits you and host the code on Apify’s cloud. Once the scraper is done, the data it gathers is available to you in the format of your choosing, such as JSON or CSV.

The Apify Web Scraper can be the ideal solution for you if you find a code template in its library that works for your particular task. That, combined with its ease of use, makes Apify an intriguing option for specific use cases.

However, just like Octoparse and ScraperAPI, Apify is expensive. Although Apify offers a free plan and a starter plan at $49 USD a month, these plans are relatively limited. The cheapest plan comes with a 32 GB memory limit for the concurrently running Actors, a maximum of thirty-two Actors that can run in parallel, and thirty data center IP addresses. Their next plan is significantly more flexible, with a 128 GB memory limit for the running Actors and a maximum of 128 Actors running in parallel. However, it costs $499 USD a month.

Data Miner

Data Miner is somewhat different from the other tools discussed here because it’s a browser extension available only for Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge users. Data Miner is easy to get started with, and you can scrape data right from your browser and export it to a CSV or XLSX file:

Here’s a quick overview of Data Miner’s pros and cons:

Data Miner has an intuitive interface and doesn’t require writing any code. You can choose from one of the numerous extraction queries that it provides, which allows you to get data with just a click. You can also make your own extraction queries and scrape any data from any site you want.

Data Miner is useful if you want to scrape popular websites. This is because it comes with over 50,000 premade queries that you can use to scrape more than 15,000 different websites. It’s also easy to set up—all you need to do is install a browser extension. If you want to quickly scrape a popular website for which extraction queries are available, Data Miner may be a good option.

Regarding the price, Data Miner’s pricing plans range from $20 USD a month to $200 USD. You can try the Data Miner extension for free, but it has significant limitations, including a maximum number of 500 pages you can scrape per month, restricted domain scraping, no support for custom JavaScript, and no crawl automation.

Conclusion

In this article, you compared the most popular instant data scrapers currently on the market. You looked at their features, ease of use, pros and cons, price, and usage.

Among the analyzed data scrapers, the Bright Data Web Scraper API stands out with its ease of use, stability, and scalability. Its many Web Scraper APIs make it easy for you to start scraping the most popular websites even without any previous coding knowledge. You can choose where to store the data and in what format.

The Bright Data Web Scraper is 100 percent compliant, with 99.99 percent uptime and a flexible pricing structure. Register now and start your free trial today!