Web crawler tools are a valuable source of data for analysis and data mining.
Web spiders, web data extraction software, and website scraping tools are all examples of internet web crawling tools. These are essential and can be used with data analysis software.
Scraping web information can help your company in a variety of ways, from market research to SEO. They gather data from a variety of public sources and offer it in a usable fashion. They assist you in keeping track of news, social media, photographs, articles, competitors, and so on.
In this top tools list, we have compiled the top 25 best web crawler tools along with their features and pricing for you to choose from.
1. Webharvy
Webharvy is a web scraping program that works with a point-and-click interface. It's made for those who aren't programmers. WebHarvy can scrape text, photos, URLs, and emails from websites automatically and save them in a variety of formats. You can use proxy servers or a VPN to access target websites.
Key Features:
-
To scrape data, there is no need to write any code or programs. You will load web pages using WebHarvy's built-in browser, and you will pick the data to be scraped with mouse clicks.
-
WebHarvy recognizes patterns of data in online pages automatically. You don't need to do any further configuration if you need to scrape a list of items (name, address, email, price, etc.) from a web page.
-
You may scrape anonymously and avoid web scraping software being prohibited by web servers by using proxy servers or VPNs to access target websites.
Cost:
Licenses start at $139.
2. Nokogiri
Nokogiri web crawler tool makes working with XML and HTML from Ruby simple and painless. It offers a simple and intuitive API for reading, editing, updating, and querying documents. It relies on native parsers like libxml2 (C) and xerces to be speedy and standards-compliant (Java).
Key Features:
-
XML, HTML4, and HTML5 DOM Parser
-
XML and HTML4 SAX Parser
-
XML and HTML4 Push Parser
-
Document search using XPath 1.0 Document search using CSS3 selectors and jquery-like extensions
-
Validation of XSD Schemas XSLT transformation
Cost:
This is a free tool.
3. NetSpeak Spider
NetSpeak Spider is a desktop web crawler tool for performing daily SEO audits, finding faults quickly, conducting systematic analysis, and scraping websites.
This web crawling tool specializes in analyzing enormous websites (millions of pages) while making the best use of RAM. The data from web crawling may be easily imported and exported to CSV.
Netpeak Spider allows you to scrape bespoke source code/text searches using one of four search types: 'Contains,' 'RegExp,' 'CSS Selector,' or 'XPath.' Scraping for emails, names, and other information can be done with the help of a tool.
Key Features:
-
Broken links and images will be found by the SEO crawler, as well as duplicate material such as pages, texts, duplicate title and meta description tags, and H1s. In just a few clicks, you may identify these serious website SEO flaws, as well as dozens of others.
-
The tool will assist you in performing an on-page optimization examination of a website, including checking the status code, crawling and indexing instructions, website structure, and redirects.
-
Data from Google Analytics and Yandex can be exported.
-
For your website pages, metrics on traffic, conversions, goals, and even E-commerce settings taking into account data range, device type, and segments.
Cost:
Packages start at $21 per month.
4. UiPath
UiPath is a free online scraping software that automates robotic processes. For most third-party apps, it automates web and desktop data crawling.
If you use Windows, you can install the robotic process automation program. UiPath can extract data from many web pages in tabular and pattern-based formats.
UiPath offers built-in capabilities for doing more crawls. When dealing with complex user interfaces, this strategy is particularly effective. Individual text components, groups of text, and blocks of text, as well as data extraction in a table format, are all handled by the screen scraping tool.
Key Features:
-
Fast digital transformation at reduced costs by streamlining processes, identifying efficiencies, and providing insights.
-
Our Marketplace's more than 200 ready-made components give your staff more time—in less time.
-
Robots from UiPath boost compliance by following the exact procedure that satisfies your requirements. Reporting keeps track of your robots, so you may access the documentation at any time.
-
Your outcomes will be more efficient and successful if you standardize your methods.
Cost:
Packages start at $420 per month.
5. Open Search Server
Open Search Server is a web crawling tool and search engine that is free and open source. It's an all-in-one, extremely powerful solution. One of the greatest options available.
One of the highest rated reviews on the internet is for OpenSearchServer. It comes with a comprehensive set of search features and allows you to create your own indexing method.
Key Features:
-
A solution that is fully integrated.
-
Everything can be indexed by crawlers.
-
Full-text, boolean, and phonetic searches are all available.
-
There are 17 different languages to choose from.
-
Classifications are made automatically.
-
Creating a schedule for things that occur on a regular basis.
Cost:
This is a free tool.
6. Helium Scraper
Helium Scraper is a visual web data crawling tool that excels when the correlation between pieces is minimal. It doesn't require any coding or setting. Users can also get online templates for particular crawling requirements. Essentially, it might meet users' crawling needs on a basic level.
Key Features:
-
Multiple off-screen Chromium web browsers are used.
-
Select and add actions from a predetermined list using a clean and straightforward UI.
-
As needed, increase the number of parallel browsers and retrieve as much data as possible.
-
For more sophisticated cases, define your own actions or use custom JavaScript.
-
Run it on your personal computer or on a dedicated Windows server.
Cost:
Licenses start at $99.
7. Spinn3r
Spinn3r web crawler tool lets you pull material from blogs, news, social media sites, RSS feeds, and ATOM feeds in its entirety.
Spinn3r comes with a blazing API that takes care of 95% of the indexing effort. This web crawling tool includes advanced spam protection, which eliminates spam and incorrect language usage, hence enhancing data security.
Spinn3r indexes content in the same way as Google does, and the extracted data is saved in JSON files. The web scraper is constantly scanning the web for updates from various sources in order to provide you with real-time articles.
Key Features:
-
The Classifier API allows developers to send text (or URLs) and have our machine learning technology label the material.
-
The Parser API allows you to parse and handle metadata for arbitrary URLs on the web on the fly.
-
The Firehose API is intended for accessing large amounts of data in bulk.
-
All of Spinn3r's APIs employ simple HTTP headers for authentication.
Cost:
This is a free tool.
8. GNU Wget
GNU Wget is a C-based free and open-source software utility for retrieving files over HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and FTPS.
NLS-based message files for a variety of languages are one of the most unique features of this tool. It can also transform absolute links in downloaded documents into relative links if desired.
Key Features:
-
Using REST and RANGE, you can resume downloads that have been interrupted.
-
Use wildcards in filenames and recursively mirror directories.
-
Message files based on NLS for a variety of languages.
-
Background / unattended operation
-
When mirroring, local file timestamps are used to determine whether documents need to be re-downloaded.
Cost:
This is a free tool.
9. 80Legs
80Legs was established in 2009 on the basic premise of making web data more accessible. Initially, the company concentrated on offering web crawling services to a wide range of customers. We developed a more scalable, productized platform as our customer base grew, allowing our users to set up, build, and run their own web crawls.
Key Features:
-
On our cloud-based platform, you can create your own web crawls.
-
Get personalised data from our comprehensive web crawl.
-
Get fast access to web data instead of scraping the web.
Cost:
Packages start at $29 per month.
10. Import.io
Import.io empowers you to effortlessly scrape millions of web pages in minutes and create 1000+ APIs based on your needs without writing a single line of code.
Import.io may now be controlled programmatically and data can be accessed in an automated manner thanks to public APIs. Crawling has been simplified thanks to Import.io, which allows you to integrate online data into your own app or website with only a few clicks.
Key Features:
-
At the touch of a button, extract data from numerous pages. We can detect paginated lists automatically, or you may help us learn by clicking on the "next" page directly.
-
Links on list pages lead to detail pages with extra information. Import.io allows you to chain them together to grab all of the data from the detail pages at once.
-
Use patterns like page numbers and category names to generate all of the URLs you need in a matter of seconds.
-
Import.io makes demonstrating how to pull data from a page simple. Simply select a column from your dataset and point to the item on the page that interests you.
Cost:
You can request a quote on their website.
11. BUbiNG
BUbiNG is a next-generation web crawler tool based on the authors' experience with UbiCrawler and ten years of research into the subject. BUbiNG is an open-source Java completely distributed crawler (no central coordination); single agents may crawl thousands of pages per second while adhering to tight politeness requirements, both host- and IP-based.
BUbiNG task distribution is based on modern high-speed protocols to provide very high throughput, unlike previous open-source distributed crawlers that use on batch approaches (like MapReduce).
Key Features:
-
A lot of parallelism.
-
The product has been widely distributed.
-
Detects (currently) near-duplicates using a stripped page's fingerprint.
-
Fast.
-
Crawling in large numbers.
Cost:
This is a free tool.
12. Webhose.io
Webhose.io is a great web crawler tool that allows you to crawl data and extract keywords in a variety of languages, thanks to numerous filters that cover a wide range of sources.
The scraped data can also be saved in XML, JSON, and RSS forms. Users can also access historical data from the Archive. Furthermore, webhose.io's crawling data findings support up to 80 languages. The structured data crawled by Webhose.io may also be simply indexed and searched by users.
Key Features:
-
In all languages, monitor and analyse media outlets.
-
Follow the discussions on message boards and forums.
-
Keep track of significant blog posts throughout the web.
-
Investigate cyber dangers on darknets and messaging apps.
-
All compromised and personally identifiable information can be found in one spot.
Cost:
You can request a quote on their website.
13. Norconex
Norconex is a useful tool for those looking for open source web crawlers for business purposes.
You may crawl any web material with Norconex. You can use this full-featured collector standalone or integrate it into your own app.
Any operating system is supported. Can crawl millions of pages on a single average-capacity server with this web crawler tool. It also provides a lot of content and metadata manipulation features. It can also grab the "featured" image from a page.
Key Features:
-
Get the metadata for the papers you're working on.
-
Pages rendered using JavaScript are supported.
-
Detection of different languages.
-
Assistance with translation.
-
Crawling speed can be adjusted.
-
Detects documents that have been changed or deleted.
Cost:
This is a free tool.
14. Dexi.io
Dexi.io is a browser-based web crawler tool that allows you to scrape data from any website using your browser. There are three sorts of robots you may use to create a scraping task: Extractor, Crawler, and Pipes. It provides anonymous web proxy servers, and your collected data will be stored on Dexi.io's servers for two weeks before being archived, or you can directly export the extracted data to JSON or CSV files. It provides paid services to meet your real-time data requirements.
Key Features:
-
Stock and price for any number of SKUs/Products can be tracked.
-
Use live dashboards and comprehensive product analytics to connect the data.
-
Prepare and rinse structured and ready-to-use product data from the web.
-
Delta reports are used to indicate market developments.
-
Professional services such as quality assurance and continuous maintenance are available.
Cost:
You can request a quote on their website.
15. Zyte
Zyte is a cloud-based data extraction application that assists thousands of developers in obtaining useful information. Its open-source visual scraping tool enables users to scrape websites without having to know any code.
Zyte employs Crawlera, a sophisticated proxy rotator that allows users to easily crawl large or bot-protected sites while avoiding bot countermeasures. Through a simple HTTP API, users may crawl from multiple IPs and locales without the hassle of proxy maintenance.
Key Features:
-
Drive revenue and save time by obtaining the data you require.
-
By utilising, you may extract web data at scale while reducing code and spider maintenance time.
-
Your online data is provided in a timely and consistent manner. As a result, you may concentrate on extracting data rather than juggling proxies.
-
Antibots that target the browser layer can now be readily handled thanks to smart browser capabilities and browser rendering.
Cost:
You can request a quote on their website.
16. Apache Nutch
Apache Nutch is unquestionably at the top of the web crawler tool heap when it comes to the greatest open source web crawlers. Apache Nutch is a prominent open source code web data extraction software project for data mining that is highly flexible and scalable.
Nutch may run on a single system, but it is most powerful when used in a Hadoop cluster. Apache Nutch is used by many data analysts and scientists, application developers, and web text mining experts all over the world. Apache Nutch is a Java-based cross-platform solution.
Key Features:
-
By default, fetching and parsing are done independently.
-
The mapping is done with XPath and namespaces.
-
Filesystem that is distributed (via Hadoop).
-
A database of link graphs.
-
The NTLM protocol is used for authentication.
Cost:
This is a free tool.
17. VisualScraper
VisualScraper is another amazing non-coding web scraper that can be used to harvest data from the web. It has a simple point-and-click interface. Aside from SaaS, VisualScraper also provides web scraping services such as data distribution and software extractor creation.
Key Features:
-
Keep an eye on your rival.
-
By tracking competition prices, you can outsmart them.
-
There is no code at all. Hiring us to do the coding is both less expensive and more effective. rather than employing a high-priced coder for your company.
-
Customized and data that is 100 percent accurate.
Cost:
This is a free tool.
18. ParseHub
ParseHub is a fantastic web crawler tool that can collect data from websites that employ AJAX, JavaScript, cookies, and other similar technologies. Its machine learning technology can read, evaluate, and convert web content into useful information.
ParseHub's desktop application is compatible with Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. You can also utilise the web app that is integrated into the browser.
You can only create five public projects on ParseHub as freeware. You can establish at least 20 private scraping projects with paid membership levels.
Key Features:
-
Access drop-down menus, login to websites, click on maps and manage sites with infinite scroll, tabs, and pop-ups.
-
Obtain information from millions of online pages. ParseHub will automatically search through thousands of links and phrases.
-
Data is automatically collected and stored on our servers.
-
For analysis, you can download your scraped data in any format.
Cost:
Packages start at $149 per month.
19. WebSphinx
WebSphinx is an excellent personal web crawler that is easy to use and customise. It's for advanced web users and Java programmers who want to crawl a small section of the internet automatically.
This web data extraction solution includes a Java class library as well as an interactive development environment. The Crawler Workbench and the WebSPHINX class library are both included in WebSphinx.
The Crawler Workbench is a user-friendly graphical user interface that lets you customise and control a web crawler. The package makes it possible to write web crawlers in Java.
Key Features:
-
Make a graph out of a collection of web pages.
-
For offline viewing, save pages to your local drive.
-
Concatenate pages to create a single document that may be viewed or printed.
-
From a series of pages, extract all text that matches a specific pattern.
Cost:
This is a free tool.
20. OutWit Hub
OutWit Hub Platform is made up of a kernel that has a vast library of data recognition and extraction functions, upon which an infinite number of unique apps may be built, each utilising the kernel's characteristics.
OutWit Hub, their main application, is a multi-purpose harvester in which we have gathered the biggest number of functions feasible in order to satisfy a wide range of purposes. The Hub has been around for a long time and has evolved into an useful and adaptable tool for both non-technical users and IT professionals who know how to code but recognise that php isn't always the most effective approach to extract data.
Key Features:
-
This web crawler tool can search through pages and save the information it finds in a useful format.
-
OutWit Hub provides a single interface for scraping small or large volumes of data depending on your need.
-
OutWit Hub allows you to scrape any web page directly from the browser, as well as construct automated agents that harvest data and format it according to your preferences.
Cost:
You can request a quote on their website.
21. Scrapy
Scrapy is a Python online scraping library that allows programmers to create scalable web crawlers. It's a full web crawling framework that takes care of all the features that make web crawlers tough to implement, such as proxy middleware and querying queries, among others.
Key Features:
-
Write the rules for extracting the data and leave the rest to Scrapy.
-
By design, it's easy to add additional functionality without having to modify the core.
-
Python-based application that runs on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, and BSD.
Cost:
This is a free tool.
22. Mozenda
Mozenda is a cloud-based self-serve Web scraping software that caters to businesses. Mozenda has enterprise customers all around the world, having scraped over 7 billion pages. Web scraping technology from Mozenda eliminates the need for scripts or hiring developers. Mozenda makes data collection 5 times faster.
Key Features:
-
With Mozenda's point-and-click feature, you can scrape text, files, photos, and PDF material from web pages.
-
Prepare data files for publication by organising them.
-
Mozeda's API allows you to export straight to TSV, CSV, XML, XLSX, or JSON.
-
Allow Mozenda to arrange your information so that you can make important decisions through their powerful Data Wrangling.
-
Integrate data through one of Mozenda's partners' platforms or create unique data integrations in a few platforms.
Cost:
You can request a quote on their website.
23. Cyotek Webcopy
Cyotek Webcopy is a free program that allows you to automatically download a website's content to your local device.
WebCopy will scan and download the content of the selected website. Links to resources on the website, such as stylesheets, pictures, and other pages, will be remapped to match the local route. You can decide which portions of a website will be duplicated and how to use its extensive setup. For example, you might generate a complete copy of a static website for offline surfing, or download all photos or other resources.
Key Features:
-
WebCopy will look at a website's HTML mark-up and try to find all associated resources, such as other sites, photos, videos, file downloads, and so on.
-
WebCopy may "crawl" a whole website and download everything it sees in this way, attempting to build a fair copy of the original.
Cost:
This is a free tool.
24. Common Crawl
Common Crawl was created for everyone who wants to explore and analyse data in order to gain useful insights. Anyone who is interested in using Common Crawl can do so without incurring any costs or other problems. It is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organisation that runs on donations to keep its operations functioning smoothly.
Key Features:
-
Common Crawl is a shared corpus for study, analysis, and education.
-
If you don't have a technical expertise, you can read the articles to learn about the intriguing insights others have gained from working with Common Crawl data.
-
Educators can use these resources to teach data analysis.
Cost:
This is a free tool.
25. Semush
Semrush is a website crawler app that looks for technical SEO flaws on your website's pages and organizational structure. Your search results can be improved by fixing these issues. It is a software-as-a-service platform that helps businesses manage their online visibility. Semrush is an essential tool for companies concerned with their online presence. It offers more than tools, 55 products, and add-ons across online visibility management, including tools for search, social media, content, and market research, data for more than 142 countries, seamless integration with Google, and task management platforms.
Key Features:
-
It provides tools for SEO, market research, social media marketing, and advertising.
-
Its user interface is intuitive.
-
It enables quick and easy website auditing.
-
It helps with log file analysis.
-
This application offers a dashboard that makes it simple to view website problems.
Cost:
Contact the company for the details.
Things To Consider When Choosing A Web Crawler Tool
Pricing
The chosen tool's cost structure should be fairly transparent. This means that hidden expenses should not be discovered later; instead, every specific detail in the pricing structure should be made known. Choose a company that has a clear model and doesn't mince words when discussing the features available.
Customer Support
You may encounter an issue when using your Web Scraping Tool and require assistance to resolve it. As a result, customer service becomes a critical consideration when selecting a decent solution. The Web Scraping service provider must make this a top priority. You won't have to worry if something goes wrong because of excellent customer service. With good customer service, you can say goodbye to the frustration of having to wait for satisfactory replies. Before making a purchase, test the customer service by contacting them and noting how long it takes them to answer before making an informed decision.
Data Quality
As previously said, the majority of the material on the Internet is unstructured and must be cleaned and organised before it can be used. Try looking for a Web Scraping service that includes the tools you'll need to clean and organise the data you've scraped. It is critical to keep this issue in mind because the quality of data will have a greater impact on analysis.
Conclusion
To summarise, the crawlers listed above can meet most users' basic crawling demands, albeit there are still many differences in functionality among these programs, as many of these crawler tools have offered users with more advanced and built-in setup tools.
Ultimately, before you subscribe to a crawler, be sure you understand all of its features.
FAQs
What Are Web Crawler Tools?
A web crawler, also known as a spider, spiderbot, or crawler, is a program that crawls the internet in order to index information that can be taken from websites.
The seeds are a collection of URLs that a web crawler will visit. It then locates all of the pages’ important hyperlinks and adds them to the list of URLs to be visited. They are then visited in a recursive manner, according to a set of policies. The crawler saves and archives data as it goes, which is saved as snapshots.
How Is Web Scraping Different From Web Crawling?
When a bot downloads content from a website without authorization, it is known as web scraping, data scraping, or content scraping. This is done with the objective of exploiting the content for nefarious purposes.
Scraping websites is usually considerably more targeted than crawling websites. Web scrapers may only be interested in specific pages or websites, whereas web crawlers will continue to follow links and crawl pages indefinitely.
Web scraper bots may ignore the load they place on web servers, however, web crawlers, particularly those from major search engines, will respect the robots.txt file and limit their requests to avoid overloading the webserver.
When Should You Consider Using Web Crawlers?
Web crawlers have multiple use cases. Spidering is a technique used by many legitimate websites, particularly search engines, to provide up-to-date information.
Web crawlers are primarily employed to make a copy of all viewed pages for later processing by a search engine, which will index the downloaded pages for quick searches.
Crawlers can also be used to automate site maintenance chores such as link checking and HTML code validation.
Crawlers can also be used to collect specific types of data from Web pages, such as e-mail addresses (usually for spam).
How Is SEO Affected By Web Crawlers?
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of preparing information for search indexing in order for a website to appear higher in search engine results.
If a website isn't crawled by spider bots, it won't be indexed and won't appear in search results. As a result, if a website owner wants organic traffic from search results, it is critical that web crawler bots be not blocked.
Hence, selecting a proper web crawling tool and implementing it is of key importance.
Why Are Web Crawlers Termed As ‘Spiders’?
The World Wide Web – which is where the "www" component of most website URLs originates from – is another name for the Internet or at least the section that most people access. Because search engine bots crawl all over the Web, just like real spiders crawl on spiderwebs, it seemed only logical to call them "spiders."
Is it legal to crawl websites?
When used for personal purposes, web crawling is acceptable. When you want to exploit data that has been scraped for someone else, particularly for profit, problems arise.
Is web crawling simple?
You can efficiently scavenge the web. Data scraping is easy for anyone if they are given the right tools. If you can't scrape the needed data, you don't necessarily have to blame programming. Many programs, including Octoparse, are available to assist non-programmers in scraping websites for pertinent information.