- Web Scraper utilizes a modular structure that is made of selectors, which instructs the scraper on how to traverse the target site and what data to extract.
- Web scraper, a standalone chrome extension, is a free and easy tool for extracting data from web pages. Using the extension you can create and test a sitemap to see how the website should be traversed and what data should be extracted. With the sitemaps, you can easily navigate the site the way you want and the data can be later exported as a CSV.
Web scraping, web crawling, html scraping, and any other form of web data extraction can be complicated. Between obtaining the correct page source, to parsing the source correctly, rendering javascript, and obtaining data in a usable form, there’s a lot of work to be done. Different users have very different needs, and there are tools out there for all of them, people who want to build web scrapers without coding, developers who want to build web crawlers to crawl large sites, and everything in between. Here is our list of the 10 best web scraping tools on the market right now, from open source projects to hosted SAAS solutions to desktop software, there is sure to be something for everyone looking to make use of web data!
1. Scraper API
Scraper is a data converter, extractor, crawler combined in one which can harvest emails or any other text from web pages. It supports UTF-8 so this Scraper scraps Chinese, Japanese, Russian, etc with ease. You do not need to have coding, xml, json experience. CONTACT INFO: The Dataminer Scraper team is ready to help you. Web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is data scraping used for extracting data from websites.The web scraping software may directly access the World Wide Web using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or a web browser. While web scraping can be done manually by a software user, the term typically refers to automated processes implemented using a bot or web crawler. Jsdom is a pure-JavaScript implementation of many web standards for Node.js, and is a great tool for testing and scraping web applications. Install it in your terminal using the following command: Install it in your terminal using the following command.
Website: https://www.scraperapi.com/
Who is this for: Scraper API is a tool for developers building web scrapers, it handles proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs so developers can get the raw HTML from any website with a simple API call.
Why you should use it: Scraper API is a tool for developers building web scrapers, it handles proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs so developers can get the raw HTML from any website with a simple API call. It doesn’t burden you with managing your own proxies, it manages its own internal pool of over a hundreds of thousands of proxies from a dozen different proxy providers, and has smart routing logic that routes requests through different subnets and automatically throttles requests in order to avoid IP bans and CAPTCHAs. It’s the ultimate web scraping service for developers, with special pools of proxies for ecommerce price scraping, search engine scraping, social media scraping, sneaker scraping, ticket scraping and more! If you need to scrape millions of pages a month, you can use this form to ask for a volume discount.
2. ScrapeSimple
Website: https://www.scrapesimple.com
Who is this for: ScrapeSimple is the perfect service for people who want a custom scraper built for them. Web scraping is made as simple as filling out a form with instructions for what kind of data you want.
Why you should use it: ScrapeSimple lives up to its name with a fully managed service that builds and maintains custom web scrapers for customers. Just tell them what information you need from which sites, and they will design a custom web scraper to deliver the information to you periodically (could be daily, weekly, monthly, or whatever) in CSV format directly to your inbox. This service is perfect for businesses that just want a html scraper without needing to write any code themselves. Response times are quick and the service is incredibly friendly and helpful, making this service perfect for people who just want the full data extraction process taken care of for them.
3. Octoparse
Website: https://www.octoparse.com/
Who is this for: Octoparse is a fantastic tool for people who want to extract data from websites without having to code, while still having control over the full process with their easy to use user interface.
Why you should use it: Octoparse is the perfect tool for people who want to scrape websites without learning to code. It features a point and click screen scraper, allowing users to scrape behind login forms, fill in forms, input search terms, scroll through infinite scroll, render javascript, and more. It also includes a site parser and a hosted solution for users who want to run their scrapers in the cloud. Best of all, it comes with a generous free tier allowing users to build up to 10 crawlers for free. For enterprise level customers, they also offer fully customized crawlers and managed solutions where they take care of running everything for you and just deliver the data to you directly.
4. ParseHub
Website: https://www.parsehub.com/
Who is this for: Parsehub is an incredibly powerful tool for building web scrapers without coding. It is used by analysts, journalists, data scientists, and everyone in between.
Why you should use it: Parsehub is dead simple to use, you can build web scrapers simply by clicking on the data that you want. It then exports the data in JSON or Excel format. It has many handy features such as automatic IP rotation, allowing scraping behind login walls, going through dropdowns and tabs, getting data from tables and maps, and much much more. In addition, it has a generous free tier, allowing users to scrape up to 200 pages of data in just 40 minutes! Parsehub is also nice in that it provies desktop clients for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, so you can use them from your computer no matter what system you’re running.
5. Scrapy
Website: https://scrapy.org
Web Page Scraper
Who is this for: Scrapy is a web scraping library for Python developers looking to build scalable web crawlers. It’s a full on web crawling framework that handles all of the plumbing (queueing requests, proxy middleware, etc.) that makes building web crawlers difficult.
Why you should use it: As an open source tool, Scrapy is completely free. It is battle tested, and has been one of the most popular Python libraries for years, and it’s probably the best python web scraping tool for new applications. It is well documented and there are many tutorials on how to get started. In addition, deploying the crawlers is very simple and reliable, the processes can run themselves once they are set up. As a fully featured web scraping framework, there are many middleware modules available to integrate various tools and handle various use cases (handling cookies, user agents, etc.).
6. Diffbot
Website: https://www.diffbot.com
Who is this for: Enterprises who who have specific data crawling and screen scraping needs, particularly those who scrape websites that often change their HTML structure.
Why you should use it: Diffbot is different from most page scraping tools out there in that it uses computer vision (instead of html parsing) to identify relevant information on a page. This means that even if the HTML structure of a page changes, your web scrapers will not break as long as the page looks the same visually. This is an incredible feature for long running mission critical web scraping jobs. While they may be a bit pricy (the cheapest plan is $299/month), they do a great job offering a premium service that may make it worth it for large customers.
7. Cheerio
Website: https://cheerio.js.org
Who is this for: NodeJS developers who want a straightforward way to parse HTML. Those familiar with jQuery will immediately appreciate the best javascript web scraping syntax available.
Why you should use it: Cheerio offers an API similar to jQuery, so developers familiar with jQuery will immediately feel at home using Cheerio to parse HTML. It is blazing fast, and offers many helpful methods to extract text, html, classes, ids, and more. It is by far the most popular HTML parsing library written in NodeJS, and is probably the best NodeJS web scraping tool or javascript web scraping tool for new projects.
8. BeautifulSoup
Website: https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/
Who is this for: Python developers who just want an easy interface to parse HTML, and don’t necessarily need the power and complexity that comes with Scrapy.
Why you should use it: Like Cheerio for NodeJS developers, Beautiful Soup is by far the most popular HTML parser for Python developers. It’s been around for over a decade now and is extremely well documented, with many web parsing tutorials teaching developers to use it to scrape various websites in both Python 2 and Python 3. If you are looking for a Python HTML parsing library, this is the one you want.
9. Puppeteer
Website: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer
Who is this for: Puppeteer is a headless Chrome API for NodeJS developers who want very granular control over their scraping activity.
Why you should use it: As an open source tool, Puppeteer is completely free. It is well supported and actively being developed and backed by the Google Chrome team itself. It is quickly replacing Selenium and PhantomJS as the default headless browser automation tool. It has a well thought out API, and automatically installs a compatible Chromium binary as part of its setup process, meaning you don’t have to keep track of browser versions yourself. While it’s much more than just a web crawling library, it’s often used to scrape website data from sites that require javascript to display information, it handles scripts, stylesheets, and fonts just like a real browser. Note that while it is a great solution for sites that require javascript to display data, it is very CPU and memory intensive, so using it for sites where a full blown browser is not necessary is probably not a great idea. Most times a simple GET request should do the trick!
10. Mozenda
Website: https://www.mozenda.com/
Who is this for: Enterprises looking for a cloud based self serve webpage scraping platform need look no further. With over 7 billion pages scraped, Mozenda has experience in serving enterprise customers from all around the world.
Why you should use it: Mozenda allows enterprise customers to run web scrapers on their robust cloud platform. They set themselves apart with the customer service (providing both phone and email support to all paying customers). Its platform is highly scalable and will allow for on premise hosting as well. Like Diffbot, they are a bit pricy, and their lowest plans start at $250/month.
Honorable Mention 1. Kimura
Website: https://github.com/vifreefly/kimuraframework
Who is this for: Kimura is an open source web scraping framework written in Ruby, it makes it incredibly easy to get a Ruby web scraper up and running.
Why you should use it: Kimura is quickly becoming known as the best Ruby web scraping library, as it’s designed to work with headless Chrome/Firefox, PhantomJS, and normal GET requests all out of the box. It’s syntax is similar to Scrapy and developers writing Ruby web scrapers will love all of the nice configuration options to do things like set a delay, rotate user agents, and set default headers.
Honorable Mention 2. Goutte
Website: https://github.com/FriendsOfPHP/Goutte
Who is this for: Goutte is an open source web crawling framework written in PHP, it makes it super easy extract data from the HTML/XML responses using PHP.
Why you should use it: Goutte is a very straight forward, no frills framework that is considered by many to be the best PHP web scraping library, as it’s designed for simplicity, handling the vast majority of HTML/XML use cases without too much additional cruft. It also seamlessly integrates with the excellent Guzzle requests library, which allows you to customize the framework for more advanced use cases.
The open web is by far the greatest global repository for human knowledge, there is almost no information that you can’t find through extracting web data. Because web scraping is done by many people of various levels of technical ability and know how, there are many tools available that service everyone from people who don’t want to write any code to seasoned developers just looking for the best open source solution in their language of choice.
Hopefully, this list of tools has been helpful in letting you take advantage of this information for your own projects and businesses. If you have any web scraping jobs you would like to discuss with us, please contact us here. Happy scraping!
Nasdaq, the second largest stock exchange market in the globe has invested in technology and web scraping by acquisition of Quandal, one of the largest alternate data platforms.
The need to hold data insights have always been a norm in the financial industry, primarily to drive insights and make well-evaluated investment decisions. This is why financial institutions – hedge funds, banks, asset managers all hoard data to keep their big-buck bearing investment decisions data-backed. Though the sector well understands the need for information, be it for equity research analysis, venture capital investment, hedge funds management, asset management etc. they do not have the tools to extract the data, get them in a structured format to draw insights.
Why consider scraping in finance?
There are so many sources and forms in which data is available. Turns out, every bit of this is as important and can really contribute to making better decisions. For instance, look how hints of mergers and acquisition data can be identified by tracking CEO’s travel patterns as Kamel, CEO of Quandel rightly states the data significance.
“What we’re interested in doing is tracking corporate, private jets, most companies hide the identity of their corporate jets, but it’s possible to unmask them, researchers carefully watching websites like FlightAware.com could theoretically piece together flight records to figure out individual planes’ tail numbers”.
Tracking of volumes of information such as news, social media, satellite data, app data etc. through an automated process such as scraping can help financial companies gain a lot of valuable insights.
Another interesting example is the one where Goldman Sachs asset management was able to identify an increase in visitors to the HomeDepot.com website by scraping website traffic from alexa.com. This helped asset manager to buy the stock well in advance of the company raising its outlook and its stock eventually appreciating.
Web scraping in hedge funds
Web Scraper Applications
Hedge funds are an investment that carries some risk in the ROI and hence the need to rely on data to accommodate the nature of volatility in the hedge fund market. Web scraping, however, will provide the investor’s information covering all angles – market forces, consumer behavior, competitive intelligence etc. that makes strategic decisions an easier process.
Going past the traditional methods like market data (earnings and macroeconomic data), a majority of the hedge fund managers are beginning to see the potential in alternate data such as information available in satellite imagery, geolocation, web scraping etc. The prowess of the web data is being increasingly recognized by the procurer of such data to unbox tremendous insights to have an informational advantage over the peers.
A hedge fund manager requires the assistance of web extraction to obtain these data sets from a third-party scraping service provider. Such data can be put to scrutiny by the data scientists partnering with portfolio managers to draw insights.
A huge part of web scraping for information that helps in efficient decision-making is dependent on the effectiveness in the financial structure and identification of the right data sets by the data scientists and the portfolio managers. Identification of alpha opportunities (a metric that represents the active returns on investment).
According to Greenwich / Thomson Reuters research the average investment firm is spending about $900,000 yearly on alternative data, and of this alternative data, clearly, the most popular form being used investment professionals is web-scraped data. Of all the methods in alternate data for hedge funds, web scraping is identified as the most effective methods.
What are the use cases of scraping in finance?
Equity research analysis
Web Scraper App
A huge investment decision requires an assessment of the financial position of the company in which you are intending to invest. Generally, the information needs to be gathered from the profit and loss statement, balance sheet and cash flow statements for numerous years. These numbers can be obtained through ratio analysis ( solvency and profitability ratios).
Web Scraper Extension
Now, these data are available on the websites in the investor relation sections ( most of the public limited companies have a dedicated page) and in the quarterly or annual reports. The information available on these sites and PDFs can be scraped to gain insights into the financial strength.
You can take a look at the investor relation page of Walt disney .
This type of data is also available in the EDGAR databases that hold annual reports and the filings are available for download or can be viewed for free.
Let’s quickly get to an example of sample code for scraping annual reports (PDFs) from the Walt Disney website. These annual reports have tons of financial data points and extracting these data from annual reports or quarterly reports for several years will help in identifying a pattern and a thorough analysis of the same will help in making better-informed decisions.
Here’ a sample code to scrape out a critical piece – the balance sheet from the PDF document from Walt Disney.
This code is developed as a sample to scrape specific pages with financial data points from a PDF document with high volumes.
The output would look like this:
Financial data and credit ratings
To assess the financial strength of borrowing entities for qualifying their ability to meet principal and interest payments. This information is particularly useful for the clients if such rating agencies like the institutional investors, banks, and insurance companies) to evaluate using near real-time updates. This type of data can be scraped from websites, Google Finance Pages, and Bloomberg Research.
Venture capital
Small businesses or start-ups require funding/investment form big businesses and hence the need to research the companies before investing. This kind of data is usually available in some websites that have information on profiling of new business and products like techcrunch and venturebeat.
Also, there are a ton of trends, technology and portfolio companies that are required to be monitored before making an investment decision. A solution like scraping will help in extracting and aggregating this data in a structured format to make a strategic venture capital decision.
Risk mitigation and compliance
Compliance with regulation is very important in the financial industry and these are put into great scrutiny leading to millions of dollars as a penalty and successive reformation cost as a consequence of a breach. Through automated monitoring, of sources that post regular updates – government regulations, court records, sanction lists etc you can effectively improve your compliance and risk management position.
Even if these sites are complex or difficult to access scraping helps in extracting regulatory updates to stay abreast of the happenings and identifying frauds.
Ditch internet surfing and use scraping instead.
Finance industry needs tons of crucial information to make strategic business decisions. Scraping has been the ultimate solution for various use cases including venture capital, hedge funds, equity research analysis etc. The potential of scraping is immense and the volume and variety of data that scraping can give within a quick TAT is something every financial service provider should leverage upon.
Scrapeworks is architectured to scour the web data in the most fashionable and structured manner that can give information which can forever redefine the value of information the Internet has got.
You can set your parameters for the scraping requirements and we can deliver the data that you want.
Read through our customer stories to understand how we extracted crucial data points from company reports and financial statements for a leading news agency and extensive crawling and extraction of financial information for a leading financial services firm.
If you have a similar need, do get in touch with us.