Nitin Sharma

Posted on Jul 22

I Tested 25+ (Free & Paid) Web Scraping Tools - These 8 Are the Absolute Best

#webscraping #ai #productivity #beginners

You know, as a web developer, I've been using a bunch of Python packages to scrape website data for years.

And now, thanks to the insane development in AI, there is a sudden rise in the need to access real-time data and build AI models or different businesses out of it.

You may have heard that:

Google is paying $60 million per year to get real-time access to Reddit's data
DeepSeek team is stealing OpenAI data for training their own AI model
And more

Well, there are multiple news stories like this, and we can say that every big company is in the process of accessing tons of real-time, filtered data. But most of us can't spend millions to gain real-time data, and we are not programmers, so we can't use Python packages, and more.

That's where you can use a number of web scraping tools that use AI to pull info from websites and scrape the data that we need.

And from the last year, I've been using a number of web scraping tools. To be precise, I've tried at least 25 of the best web scraping tools, and now want to recommend the best 8 for you.

Note: This post contains no affiliate links so when you visit a website and try it out, I won't be making a single penny. I've used tons of web scraping products, and I just want to recommend some of the best ones that can actually help and provide value to my readers.

My only intention is to provide value, and if you find something helpful, you can subscribe to my newsletter on Substack.

With that said, let's get started.

1. Bright Data

If you ask any web-scraping expert which one is the best web scraping tool, most will recommend Bright Data, since this is the best platform to extract data from any public website.

Yes, it's that powerful, and that's the reason I've added this one at the #1 position.

But how to get started? Well, you need to visit their website and click on the button "Get started for free" to create your account.

And then you can use scraping solutions, proxy networks, a dataset marketplace with ready-made, clean data, and more.

Not only that, but this tool provides Web Access APIs so that developers can automate their scraping workflows with APIs.

The best part?

Bright Data is built for professionals, auto-solves multiple issues like solving CAPTCHAs, avoiding detection, retrying when needed, and even provides ready-to-train data for your AI models.

Talking about the pricing - you can get started for free, and then, if you want to try more, they have classified pricing for different categories.

2. Apify

Now this is very similar to Bright Data and an incredible platform for web scraping, data extraction, and automation.

I'm talking about Apify, and their team calls it a "full‑stack platform for web scraping".

With Apify, you can use tons of web scrapers and even customize them, build your own scrapers, automate workflows, integrate with your popular tools easily, publish your agents and get paid, and much more.

To get started, simply visit their website and click on the button "Get started" to create your account.

And then you can see their dashboard and use a number of services present in the sidebar.

Here, I can use multiple scrapers, create tasks, make automations, schedule each scraper or task at a specific interval, and more.

Talking about the pricing, it provides a free plan in which you get $5 to use their services along with 8GB RAM.

And then it has three paid plans, which start from $39 per month, and so on.

3. Octoparse

Well, I've been using Octoparse since last year.

It is a no-code solution to scrape and turn web pages into structured data within a few clicks.

To get started, just visit their website, click the "Download" button to install the app, and create your account.

Then you can add the specific URL you want to scrape, use one of their many templates, or take a few tutorials to understand how Octoparse works.

I tried scraping some specific data about children's books from Amazon, and here's what I got:

Now, talking about the features - it has a point-and-click interface, auto-detection, can handle tricky and dynamic websites, solves captchas automatically, and a lot more.

As for pricing, you can get started for free - create up to 10 tasks and scrape unlimited pages per run.

Sure, if you want to create more tasks, you'll need to upgrade to one of their paid plans.

4. Web Scraper

When I was researching the best web scraping tools, this one showed up in the #1 spot on Google - and a lot of posts recommended it too.

I'm talking about Web Scraper, and to be honest, I don't really like their website design.

To get started, just visit their website and click the "Install Chrome Plugin" button.

Then, open your browser's developer tools, create a new sitemap by adding the URL you want to scrape, and go from there.

Here's a short and simple tutorial playlist created by the Web Scraper team that walks you through the entire process:

Now, what can this tool actually do?

Well, you can scrape data using a point-and-click interface, extract from dynamic sites, integrate the data with any system, automatically bypass captchas and bot protection, and more.

And the best part? You can even automate the whole data extraction process in the cloud.

As for pricing, you can start for free using just the browser extension.

And as you'll see, you can try out their paid plans free for up to 7 days.

5. ParseHub

You can think of this one as similar to Octoparse.

I'm talking about ParseHub, and it's a popular, free, and powerful web scraping tool that lets you extract data with ease.

To get started, simply visit their website and download their app.

And then you simply need to create your account, add the URL you want to scrape the data from, and use the point-and-click interface to scrape the required data.

Here are the features provided by ParseHub:

You see, it automatically does IP rotation, can handle infinite scrolling pages, lets you schedule collections, use their API, and integrate your extracted data anywhere, and more.

As for pricing, it provides a free plan which lets you scrape 200 pages of data for free per run.

And then if you want more, you can go with one of the paid plans.

6. ScrapingBee

Well, the next web scraping tool every post on the internet recommended is ScrapingBee.

In simple terms, it gives you a lightweight REST API that can help you extract HTML from any website in a single API call. You can also use it with Python, NodeJS, Go, and more to scrape the data the way you want.

Talking about the features, it handles headless browsers, rotates proxies for you, offers AI-powered data extraction, JavaScript rendering, CAPTCHA solving, and more.

To get started, simply visit their website, and sign up using your email or through Google to create your account.

And then I tried it myself to get data by adding a URL, and I got results in no time.

If you want, you can even use different proxies and apply some advanced parameters to get the data that you need.

As for the pricing, you can get started for free, and then here are the paid plans:

7. Chat4Data

This was released just a month back and has gone viral thanks to the insane features it provides.

I'm talking about Chat4Data, and here you can extract structured data from any website just by chatting with AI.

But how to get started? Well, simply visit their website, and then click on the button "Add to Chrome" to download their Chrome extension and sign up.

After that, you can visit any website, open the Chat4Data Chrome extension in the sidebar, and chat to scrape what you want.

Thanks to this, you don't need to learn programming or spend too much - simply install Chat4Data and scrape what you want.

Talking about the pricing, when you create an account, you get 1 million free tokens, which is more than enough to get started.

And if you want to try more, you get another 1 million tokens for just $1.

Here's a great tutorial if you want to learn more:

8. Thunderbit

Now, the last one is the simplest yet most powerful web scraping tool I've used so far.

I'm talking about Thunderbit - an AI web scraper that lets you scrape leads and other data in just 2 clicks.

Yes, you can scrape any website in just 2 clicks.

To get started, simply visit their website and click "Install from Chrome Web Store" to install the Thunderbit Chrome extension.

Then visit the website you want to scrape, open the Thunderbit extension, launch the scraper, click on "AI Suggest Columns" (it will guess what data you need), and then just hit "Scrape".

Here's a great tutorial video for you:

Now, talking about the features - you can scrape using natural language, summarize/categorize/translate data, do subpage scraping, extract articles or transcripts, use pre-built templates for popular sites, and more.

As for pricing, you can get started for free and scrape data from up to 6 pages per month, and even export it.

If you want more, you can go with one of their paid plans, which start at $9/month (billed annually).

Hope you like it.

That's it - thanks.

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