Data Scraping Tools for Beginners

By: Anna Cave

It can be very intimidating to start data scraping, but here are a few tools that can help get you started.

Data scraping is the process of extracting data from different websites and compiling it for later use. We wrote an article a couple weeks ago about what data scraping actually is, which you can read here for more information. Now that we know how data scraping actually works, we want to discuss a few easy tools we recommend for analysts who are just getting started with data scraping. 

Parsehub: Parsehub is one of the simplest tools to use, as it requires no knowledge of coding. To scrape from the web, all the user needs to do is upload a site link into the program and the click on the data you want. It detects patterns quickly and allows you to go to different tabs and drop-downs on the site to obtain even more data.  After scraping, Parsehub allows you to download the data in Excel or in the JSON format, and their free version gives you up to 200 pages of data in 40 minutes. 

Octoparse: Octoparse has an incredibly simple user interface, which makes it appealing to new data scrapers. Octoparse doesn't require any coding and instead just requires the user to make selections on the page about what data they want to scrape. Octoparse detects patterns, so you only need to make selections on one piece of data and it collects all the data on the page. For example, if you were scraping data from a Twitter feed, you could select the Twitter handle of one tweet and it collects data for every Twitter handle on the page. Octoparse can scrape data from 98% of websites, but they have popular templates to make it easier to scrape from common sites. Some of the most used templates are ones for Twitter, Instagram, Amazon, Google Maps, and Trip Advisor.

Data Scraper (Chrome Extension): Data Scraper is an extension you can add to Google Chrome that allows you to scrape table and listing type data from an HTML webpage. After extracting the data, this extension will upload the data into Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets that can later be downloaded as an XLS, XLSX, CSV, or TSV file. Data Scraper is often used to scrape from search engines, emails, website directories, social media, and eCommerce sites. With this scraper's free plan, you can get 500 scrape credits a month. ​

​Webhose.io: Webhose.io specializes in producing real-time, clean, scraped data in an organized format. After Webhose.io cleans and organizes the scraped data, it exports it in a machine readable format that covers multiple content domains. This tool works in real-time so it gives you your web data as it is produced online. This software has a free plan that allows you to make 1000 HTTP requests per month. 

These are just a few of the easiest tools to help you get started with data scraping, but it is by no means an extensive list. For a fuller list of tools that work for different types of data scraping, check out this longer list we built. ​