Web crawling, which has different names in the market like web scraping, web data extraction, etc., is a concept that is being used by individuals, businesses, and enterprises a lot, especially in the recent times. It can be defined as a process in which any program or automated tool browses through the world wide web in a structured manner to fetch and collect all the new as well as old data from various websites and then store those data for ease of access for the users.
If you are looking for tools that will help you fetch data from the websites, you have come to the correct article. Here you will be presented with 13 different tools that are either completely free to use or have premium subscriptions as well. Continue reading to learn more!
What are the different tools available to crawl websites for free?
The list given below will give you information about the 13 different tools that will crawl websites that have both free and premium plans if you need more advanced tools. Continue reading!
- Octoparse
Octoparse is one of the most famous and widely used web scraping cloud platforms out there. With just a few clicks, the scraped web data will get transformed into a well-organized spreadsheet in no time!
You can use this tool for free for 14 days and switch over to the other paid packages to get hold of the advanced features. The price to use the standard and professional plan is $79 per month and $209 per month respectively.
The features of this tool are
- User-friendly and no coding is required to crawl websites
- Download the scraped data in excel sheet, API, and CSV
- You can scrap and access that data from the Octoprase cloud platform
- You can also schedule scraping at any time, be it hourly, daily, or even weekly
- Automatic IP rotation so that the IP address does not get blocked.
- HTTrack
If you are looking for a tool that will crawl through websites and download all the contents from there absolutely for free, HTTrack is the one for you. It is an open-source website crawler that will download all kinds of data like HTML, images, and other files into your computer.
The most unique thing about HTTrack is that it can mirror one or more than one website at the same time with sharable links. Thus, if you open one page of your mirrored website in your browser, you can navigate the website from one link to another and it will give you the feel as if you are browsing it online.
This tool can also update the existing mirrored website and can resume the interrupted downloads. Different versions are available for Windows, Linux, Unix, and BSD users.
- ParseHub
ParseHub is an amazing and powerful website crawler that collects and stores data from websites that utilize JavaScript, Ajax pages, and cookies as well. You can access the data any way you want to – in API format, CSV/Excel, Google Sheet, and Tableau. If you choose to use ParseHub, you can instruct it to do several things like –
- Search through places like forms,
- Open dropdowns,
- Handle websites that demands to scroll through tabs and pop-ups
- Maps
- Login to websites
ParseHub will do all of these things and scrap the exact kind of data you wanted. There are two paid plans of ParseHub – Standard and Professional and the price for each plan are $189 and $599 per month. The best part about this web crawler is that you do not need any credit card to use the free plan and you have the option to cancel the subscription of the paid plans any time you want to.
Using this web crawler is very easy. All you need to do is –
- Download the desktop application and select the website from where you need the data
- Click to select which data you want
- Download the results and access the data in any format.
- Visual Scraper
Visual Scraper is another easy-to-use web crawling tool that is completely free to use. You need not know coding to use this tool. The interface is simple with a ‘point-and-click’ system. You will be able to extract the latest data and access those data in the form of Excel, CSV, MS Access, MySQL, MSSQL, XML, and JSON. If you want to use the paid version, there is only one package that will cost you $99.
Visual scraper not only offers SaaS but also provides web scraping services like data delivery service and also software extraction service. It also allows the user to schedule the particular time when it will crawl through websites to fetch data and you can also repeat that sequence every day. You can schedule it in the form of minutes, days, weeks, and also months. You can also get data from news updates, and articles.
- Zyte (earlier known as Scrapinghub)
If you are looking for another cloud-based web crawling tool, Zyte is perfect for you! It is one of the most used web crawlers by most of the developers out there who trust Zyte to fetch any kind of data they want. It is quick and reliable with 24/7 customer support. The price packages to use this particular web crawler is very interesting. You need to pay according to the kind of service you want from Zyte. Here is how:
- Data extraction service – from $450 per month
- Smart proxy managers – from $29 per month
- Smart browser – from $100 per month
- Automatic extraction – from $60 per month
- Scrappy cloud – from $9 per month
- Splash – $25 per month
- Helium Scraper
Helium scraper also uses the point-and-click interface which makes it user-friendly for anyone who is new in web crawling to fetch data. When you will open the website, you will find a short tutorial on how you can use Helium Scraper to crawl websites.
Here are the significant features:
- Export data in form of CSV, Excel, XML, JSON, and SQLite
- Superfast extraction
- SQL generation
- Manipulate the text the way you want to
- Proxy rotation
- Detects similar elements
- Automatically can detect tables and lists from any website.
The price range starts from $99 per month per 1 user and goes on to $699 per month per 10 users.
- WebHarvy
WebHarvy is a point-and-click web crawling tool that is designed especially for all non-programmers. WebHarvy does not just stop at crawling simple data from websites. It can extract images, texts, URLs, emails, and HTML and you can access this data from various other formats. Here are the features:
- Use WebHarvy’s own website to navigate the websites
- It can detect patterns like name, address, email, price, etc from any website
- You can save the file and database in Excel, XML, CSV, JSON, or TSV files. The data can be extracted in the SQL database.
- Submit keywords for WebHarvy to search through the web
- Supports image scraping
- You can automate the browser tasks
The price range for using this web crawling tool is $139 per 1 user to $699 for unlimited users.
- Cyoteck Webcopy
As its name suggests, Webcopy will copy all the contents of websites and will save the contents on your hard drive so that you can view it in offline mode. Whether it is an image, style-sheets, or other pages present in any website, this web crawling tool will automatically remap those links to match the local path during downloads.
One thing that you need to keep in mind is that Cyoteck Webcopy does not include any form of JavaScript parsing or a virtual DOM. This means that if any website has heavily used JavaScript to operate, it will not be able to extract a true copy.
- 80Legs
80legs is another premium cloud-based web crawling website that can be customized according to your requirements. Majorly, it provides three products:
- Custom web crawling
- Giant web crawl to pull data from the entire website
- Datafiniti to get instant access to web data and skip the entire process of web scraping
The attractive feature of this web crawler is that it has a free plan that will allow unlimited crawls per month but run 1 crawl at a time. The paid packages are the intro, plus and premium and the price for each is $29 per month, $99 per month, and $299 per month respectively.
- Sequentum (Content Grabber)
This web crawling tool is a little different than the rest of the crawling tools on this list. It targets the enterprises and provides three kinds of services – web data extraction, document management, and intelligent process automation also known as IPA. Here are the notable features:
- Easy point and click interface.
- Can be customized in any coding language like Python3, C#, JavaScript, etc
- The automation routines like infinite scroll, change tracking, and de-duplication can be reused
- Has alarm, and sends alerts
- Can detect errors and can control the flow
You need not pay on a monthly basis here. The annual subscription plan starts from $15000 and goes up to $75000 which is the annual server spend.
- Import.io
Import.io is a well-known web crawling tool for every eCommerce growth. This tool will help you to scrap hundreds of websites and fetch a huge amount of data in a matter of minutes. It made the crawling process a lot easier by simply integrating the web data into your own website or application in just a few clicks!
You can also schedule the crawling on an hourly, weekly, and monthly basis. It provides solutions for analytics providers, brands, and retailers. For the pricing, you need to fill in some basic details on their website and contact them to tell them about your requirements.
- Getleft
Let us now come to an easy-to-understand and use web crawling tool which is also free to use- Getleft. It will give you the allowance to download the entire website or any significant page that you were looking to download. Whenever you open Getleft, all you need to do is enter the URL from where you need the data and then select the exact files you want to download. While it works, it changes all the links to relative ones so that you can browse locally.
- Webz.io (Webhose.io)
Webz.io is the web crawling tool for you if you need data from every nook and corner of the internet whether it is the open, deep, or dark web. It gives complete coverage of all data types that includes news, reviews which are the customer feedback, blogs, archived web data, and online forums.
It can even detect data breaches which means it can detect wherever there is any personal information comprised across the web. It can also uncover the cyber threats across every dark network and messaging application. It can translate all of the unstructured web information into the structured format of JSON and XML which the machines can understand. You can use this tool for free and talk to their customer support to get hold of the advanced features and discuss the pricing as well.
Conclusion
The table given below will give you the names of all the best tools to crawl websites.
| Category | Name of the web crawling tool |
| The best web crawling tool for non-coders | Octoparse |
| The best free web crawling tool | Visual Scraper |
| The most advanced web crawling tool | Content grabber and Zyte |
| The most affordable web crawling tool | Zyte and 80legs |
We hope that this article has helped you understand how every tool works and which tool will be appropriate for you. Do you already use any of these web crawling tools? Do let us know!
