Are you looking for another web scraping tool? Take a look at the alternatives to Octoparse that you can use for data collection.

Web scraping, also known as online data mining, is the act of gathering vast volumes of information from the internet and storing it in databases for further study and usage. Web scraping provides information about price statistics, market dynamics, current trends, rival activities, and the issues they confront. Certainly, if you know how to acquire it, this information is easily available for any company.

Extracting online data used to include manually copying the text accessible on a web page to a local file; this method was inefficient and could not be utilized for commercial applications. Moreover, basic web scraping features are available in spreadsheet applications such as Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, and they were mostly used to extract HTML tables from webpages.

In an industry where everything focuses on the consumer, competitor analysis is not an option but a must. Having so much data at your disposal can provide you with a competitive advantage in whichever sector you work in.

Web scraping is not a new idea for most data scientists, but it is becoming more well-known as a result of the vast amount of data available on the internet and new firms that don’t want to waste time gathering data that can be accessed fast on the internet. Additionally, there are thousands of web scraping tools available. For this reason, take a look at these alternatives to Octoparse that you can use for data collection:

1. Codery

The Codery API crawls a website and extracts all of its structured data. You only need to provide the URL and they will take care of the rest.  In the form of an auto-filling spreadsheet, extract specific data from any webpage.

Using Codery, with a single request, the scale search engine crawls pages. To manage all types of websites, use a real browser to scrape and handle all of the javascript that runs on the page.

2. ScrapingBee

The second API to present is known as ScrapingBee. This web scraping tool focuses on extracting the data you need, and not dealing with concurrent headless browsers that will eat up all your RAM and CPU. Furthermore, it allows you to render Javascript with a simple parameter so you can scrape every website, even Single Page Applications using React, AngularJS, Vue.js, or any other libraries.

3. Page2API

Page2API is a versatile API that offers you a variety of facilities and features. Firstly, you can scrape web pages and convert HTML into a well-organized JSON structure. Moreover, you can launch long-running scraping sessions in the background and receive the obtained data via a webhook (callback URL).Page2API presents a custom scenario, where you can build a set of instructions that will wait for specific elements, execute javascript, handle pagination, and much more. For hard-to-scrape websites, they offer the possibility to use Premium (Residential) Proxies, located in 138 countries around the world.