Whether you want to spy on your competitor, extract data from a sample website, or develop software by extracting useful information from the sites – either way, having a data extraction tool by your side helps.
For starters, web scraping, web harvesting, data extraction, or screen scraping is a process of extracting data from certain websites. An ideal data extraction tool helps you by converting unstructured data into structured data to facilitate you with easy storage and retrieval.
Although you can choose to write an appropriate script for such purposes, this is often time-consuming and involves a lot of trial and error. This is why it is highly recommended to use data extraction tools.
Here is an obvious question – which tool must you choose to go for?
If you are feeling overwhelmed with an array of choices available at your disposal, here is a list of the best data extraction tools you can rely on upon without any doubts.
By far, the most powerful and reliable tool on the market to extract data from search engines and e-commerce websites with a 100% success rate. Real-Time Crawler does it all for you – it routes traffic through geo-located IPs, sets correct headers, reuses cookies, and much more.
Real-Time Crawler is beyond easy to implement using your preferred language and provides data in various formats, even from the most complex targets. Aimed at more prominent players in the web scraping game, but also an ideal solution for businesses who forecast to scale up. With the bonus of having a dedicated account manager to oversee the whole operation. It’s pure magic of a solution!
Features:
- The tool guarantees a 100% success rate even from the most complex targets
- Highly customizable, CAPTCHA solving, and structured data in the required format
- Easy to integrate, and dedicated account manager to support the operation
Easy to configure and use, this data extraction tool must be in your kit for all the right reasons. The tool flaunts a highly easy to use point and click user interface which guides you through all the involved steps when it comes to navigating through the website and extracting fields from a website.
Features:
- The tool allows you to extract data even from pages with high ad content, all thanks to its advanced ad blocking feature.
- The entire data extraction process happens on the cloud and your local machine.
- Helps you in exporting scraped data in a range of formats including HTML, CSV, TXT, Excel and the likes.
A free web scraping tool, ParseHub is an advanced web scraper that makes the entire process of web scraping as simple as 1, 2, and 3. The tool allows you to download the extracted data in a range of formats, according to your needs.
Features:
- Highly intuitive and easy-to-follow graphical interface.
- Allows you to store data on servers automatically.
- You can easily clean text and HTML before downloading data.
Scraper API is an advanced data extraction tool. The tool is capable of bypassing CAPTCHAs, and can even help you in managing browsers and proxies. All you need to do is make a simple API call, and the required HTML of a web page will be presented to you.
What’s more, the API is straightforward easy to integrate. You just need to send a GET request with your API key and URL to the API endpoint, and you’re done!
Features:
- Can render JavaScript effortlessly.
- Allows you to build scalable web scrapers on the go, all thanks to the high-speed and reliability that the API provides
- You can customize the request as well as the header of each request depending on the requirements.
Importing the required data from the concerned web page and exporting it to CSV was never this easy! Import.io is the ultimate web scraping tool that helps you integrate the data, thus scraped into your applications with the help of webhooks and APIs.
Features
- Allows you to schedule data extraction as per your requirements
- Can communicate with logins and webforms effortlessly
- Easily store and manage data with the help of Import.io cloud
- Automate workflows and web interactions
If you are looking for a tool which can help you in crawling a website, extracting the data, and could also provide web support for Mac and Windows OS all at once, you need to try FMiner.
Features:
- Easily design your data extraction project with the help of a visual editor
- Crawl through the web pages by using URL pattern matching, link structures or drop-down selections
- The tool allows you to extract data even from the most advanced and secure dynamic websites
- Circumvent CAPTCHA protection by using an automated third –party de-CAPTCHA tools
The Wrap Up
As is evident, there is a range of data scraping tools available. Simply choose the ones from this list and get started. The best part – most of them are free!
What are your views on this? Which tool is your best pick? Did we miss any essential data extraction tool which you think deserves mention here? Let us know in the comments below.