Eleven popular cloud-based web crawling services in 2022
Web crawling services have been widely used in many fields today. They are used to extract data from web pages across the internet. The extracted information is then organized in a structured manner that is useful to the user.
Web crawling services use an automated tool called a spider bot. The spider crawls through different websites and gathers the required information. The data is then organized as Excel, HTML, or CSV files, based on the requirement. All the information gathering and organizing are done in a time and cost-efficient manner.
There are numerous web crawling services out there. Each service provider brings something unique to the picture and at different price points. Cloud-based web crawling services are high in demand as it offloads all the setup and backend tasks to the service provider. Businesses only need to focus on data extraction.
With the market flooded with hundreds of cloud-based web crawling services providers, choosing the right one for you might become difficult. But worry not. To ease your task, we have provided you with the best cloud-based web crawling services in 2022. But before we discuss the popular cloud-based web crawling services in 2022, here’s a look at the general factors you should consider before choosing a cloud-based web crawling service.
Factors to Consider Before Choosing Web Crawling Services in 2022
Eleven Popular Cloud-Based Web Crawling Services in 2022
Factors to Consider Before Choosing Web Crawling Services in 2022
Before choosing a web crawling services provider, you should factor in the following points that can help determine which service is the best suited for you.
Cross-Platform Support
While the actual crawling happens in the cloud, you need to ensure that the software/browser extension can be installed and run on multiple platforms. Make sure that the scraper software is supported on multiple operating systems such as Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. Similarly, ensure that the browser extension is supported on Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and other web browsers.
API Support
Web crawling needs differ from enterprise to enterprise. Some businesses have an in-house development team to write their own data extraction code. If you are one such business, make sure that the web crawling services provide API support for you to integrate your own codes with the API.
Usage Limit
Every provider has a usage limit set based on the subscription plan. There might be a limit on the amount of crawled data, the number of requests, or the number of simultaneous data extraction processes. Thus, make sure that you choose a service provider and subscription plan that accommodates your needs.
Pricing
Every cloud-based web crawling service provider has a subscription plan. The plans range from as low as USD 5 to even USD 500 per month, based on the services offered. Choose a subscription plan that doesn’t burn a hole in your pocket while also fulfilling all your web crawling and data extraction needs.
Eleven Popular Cloud-Based Web Crawling Services in 2022
BotScraper
BotScraper’s web crawling service is one of the best you’ll find. The scraper can dig deep into the vastness of the internet to find every bit of data that is required. It then converts the data into meaningful information, such as an XML sheet, CSV, MySQL, and JSON formats. The data scraping frequency can be decided as per your requirements. The scraper bot can be run daily, weekly, or monthly and can be modified as per needs.
The web crawling services can be used for competitor analysis, price monitoring, and lead generation, to name a few. The scraper can be leveraged by businesses across various domains. Real-estate, eCommerce, media, tourism, and BFSI are some of the sectors that can leverage BotScraper’s web crawling services.
BotScraper’s cloud-based web crawling services are free to use and can fetch you a hundred records per month. If your requirement is higher, you can opt for the paid plans.
Scrapy Cloud
Scrapy cloud does not provide a web crawler itself. However, it provides a powerful and robust cloud hosting platform for web crawling services. Scrapy cloud provides optimized web crawling servers that can be used for web crawling and data extraction at any scale.
The cloud-hosting platform can integrate with multiple web crawling services and tools. Splash, Crawlera, and Spidermon are just a few of the supported tools. Some other notable features of Scrapy Cloud are:
- Ability to manage and automate spiders at scale
- Run, monitor, and control crawlers easily
- On-demand scaling with just a few clicks
Scrapy’s web crawling services plan starts at USD 9 per month with a free trial option for new users. The extracted data can be retrieved in CSV, JSON, JSONLines, and XML formats. The extracted data can be retained for a period of 120 days with paid plans.
Mozenda
Mozenda is a popular web crawling service provider with over ten years of experience. The crawling services have been leveraged by Fortune 500 companies. Mozenda has scraped over seven billion web pages to date and counting. Some features that make Mozenda the go-to choice for web crawling services are its ability to scrape region-specific data with just a few clicks and create job sequences to automate the flow. The data can be exported directly to CSV, XML, JSON, or XLSX format through the API.
There are three plans, standard, corporate, and enterprise, with a trial option also available. The pricing for the plans is available on request.
Grepsr
Grepsr’s web crawling services can be used for lead generation, competitor data analysis, and news aggregation, to name a few. The company has a presence in over forty countries, with more than fifty thousand lifetime users.
When it comes to pricing, Grepsr provides simple and flexible data scraping and web crawling services plans. The on-demand solutions plan starts at USD 199 per month. It provides web platform access and data retention for thirty days. The data can be downloaded in CSV, JSON, or XLSX formats.
Bright data
BrightData is an open-source web crawling service that can be used for data extraction. It provides not one but two data crawling and scraping services. These services are named Web Unlocker and Data collector. Let’s have a look at each.
Data collector
Data collector provides real-time data collection from any website at any scale. The extracted data can be downloaded in the desired format. The data collector tool can be easily integrated with email clients, Azure Cloud, and Google Cloud Storage, among many others. You can also get the data as it changes in real-time. Thus, the advanced crawling spider helps save time, money, and resources with data extraction.
Data collector has a bunch of pricing plans. There is a pay-as-you-go model, monthly subscription, and yearly subscription plan. The monthly subscription plans start at USD 750 and go up to USD 2000. The yearly subscription plans are similar to the monthly subscription plans. The only difference is that users get a ten percent discount with a yearly subscription on their monthly counterparts.
Web Unlocker
Web unlocker helps unlock websites with just one request. It can be used for web data extraction, market research, SEO monitoring, and website testing. Web unlocker has similar pricing plans as data collector. There are three payment models, and users get a ten percent discount with yearly subscription plans.
Apify
Apify has a host of modules called actors that do the task of data processing, turning web pages into API, and web crawling. It also has readymade actors such as YouTube scraper, Facebook scraper, Google Maps scraper, and SEO audit tool, to name a few. The readymade actors can be used for a plethora of functions. Some of them include:
- Converting HTML pages to PDF files
- Scraping and web crawling services to extract data from millions of web pages
- Analyzing on-page SEO
- Other services that can help with various business operations.
Apify has multiple subscription plans starting from a free plan to a team plan that costs USD 499 per month. Users can get a ten percent discount with yearly subscription.
ParseHub
ParseHub provides advanced web crawling services that let users extract a wide range of data from various websites. You can even scrape and download data from any JavaScript and AJAX page. There is no coding knowledge required. Just open a website and click on the data you want to download. The extracted data can be downloaded in Excel and JSON formats and can be imported in Google Sheets and Tableau.
ParseHub offers a free plan that scrapes data from 200 pages in only forty minutes. The top-tier plan is the professional plan that costs USD 499 a month. Users get 200 pages of data in two minutes and the ability to scrape data from unlimited pages per run.
Dexi
Dexi provides cloud-based web crawling services similar to ParseHub. The only exception is that it has a web-based point and click utility instead of a desktop-based tool. It requires no installation and can be accessed from a web browser. Dexi lets you develop, host and schedule scrapers like others. It also supports a large number of add-ons that make it stand out from other web crawling services mentioned on this list. Some notable features of Dexi include:
• File Formats supported CSV, JSON, XML
• Write to most databases through add-ons
• Integration with various cloud services
Dexi provides a free trial. You will need to contact Dexi for information on paid plans.
Diffbot
Diffbot provides one of the best web crawling services out there. The scraper can analyze thousands of web pages to extract textual, images, and video data. The Diffbot API enables automatic data extraction. If the API doesn’t work for the sites you need, you can also create a custom extractor. The search results are structured so that you can see only the matching results. The data can be exported in CSV, JSON, and Excel file formats.
The pricing starts at USD 299 per month and goes up to USD 899 per month. Diffbot also offers a free trial for two weeks with full access to the Diffbot API.
Octoparse
Octoparse is another familiar, popular web crawling services provider. It doesn’t require any technical knowledge and can be used by non-developers with ease. The Octoparse tool is also easy to set up and use. The extracted data can be downloaded in CSV, Excel, or API formats.
The pricing starts at USD 75 per month. Octoparse also has a professional plan that costs USD 209 per month. Users can also opt for a free plan that provides unlimited pages per crawl and 10,000 records per export.
Import.io
With Import.io, you can build your own datasets by importing data from web pages. The data can then be exported in CSV format. You can also build thousands of APIs based on requirements.
While Import.io provides similar functionalities to other web crawling services mentioned on this list, it also has certain drawbacks as well. To begin with, users have complained that the pricing is too high compared to other similar services. The pricing is available only after a consultation. Moreover, customer support isn’t on par with other web crawling services.
Conclusion
We have tried our best to list the eleven popular cloud-based web crawling services in 2022. We hope that they will help ease your web crawling and data extraction workload. Before you choose a web crawling service for your business, make sure that you carry out additional research from your end.
You can contact the web crawling services provider and have a one-on-one consultation to figure out which best suits your needs. Alternatively, you can also choose free trials provided by some of the service providers to get a glimpse of the web crawling services offered.
You can then choose the one that perfectly fits your needs and budget. So, which cloud-based web crawling service are you looking forward to using? Do let us know.