In this blog, I will show you how to create a Chrome extension for web scraping.
A web scraper is a tool that helps you extract useful information from websites. It does this by visiting one or more pages – usually at regular intervals – and taking the data it finds there and storing it somewhere for later retrieval or processing.
Web scraping is the process of using bots to extract content and data from a website. Unlike screen scraping, which only copies pixels displayed onscreen, web scraping extracts underlying HTML code and, with it, data stored in a database. The scraper can then replicate entire website content elsewhere.
Scraping is used to collect data for price comparison websites, contact lists, research projects or other purposes. However, some websites don’t like scrapers because they use up bandwidth and can cause crashing or slow down loading times.
Web scrapers typically take something out of a page, to make use of it for another purpose somewhere else. An example would be to find and copy names and phone numbers, or organizations and their URLs, to a list (contact scraping). Web scrapers vary widely in design and complexity, depending on the project.
Chrome Extension For Web Scraping
The importance of web scraping cannot be overemphasized – within a few hours; you can convert a whole website with hundreds of thousands of pages into structured data that you need for your businesses or research thorough automated means.
Web scrapers as the tool that makes web scraping possible, and there are many web scrapers you can get in the market. Some are paid while others are free. In terms of platform support, we can say that Chrome is one of the most popular platforms that get the attention of developers of web scrapers, and a good number of web scrapers have been developed for the Chrome platform as extensions.
Chrome is the most popular web browser in the market right now, and the Chrome Web Store is host to over 180,000 extensions with web scrapers being part of them. While a good number of them in the Chrome Web Store are free, it does not mean all of them are worthy of being used for any serious web scraping problem. It is because of this that this article has been written – to provide you recommendations on the best web scrapers available in the Chrome Web Store.
Why Use Web Scrapers Available as Chrome Extensions?
There was a time that developers do not see Chrome extensions as software to be taken seriously. That time is long gone as more and more users of Chrome find extension helpful. Now, full-blown softwares are available as Chrome extensions and web scrapers are some of them. But why should you use them? They are lightweight, easy to develop, and as such, they are usually cheap, while some are even free. This then means that they are cost-effective compared to others developed as cloud-based platforms and installable apps on PCs. They are also cross-platform.
Top 5 Web Scraper Chrome Extensions
Make no mistake about it; web scraping can only be easy, fast, and stress-free only if you use the best web scrapers for your web scraping projects. Unfortunately, we have come to realize that a good number of web scrapers in the market are living on hypes, and as such, it is important we clear the air to prevent you from making the mistake of choosing the wrong tool for the job. Below are the 5 best web scrapers available as Chrome extensions that we have tried, and they prove to work quite well.
WebScraper.io Extension
- Pricing: Free
- Free Trials: Chrome version is completely free
- Data Output Format: CSV
Webscraper.io is a web scraping tool provider with a Chrome browser extension and a Firefox add-on. The webScraper.io Chrome extension is one of the best web scrapers you can install as a Chrome extension. With over 300,000 downloads – and impressive customer reviews in the store, this extension is a must-have for web scrapers. With this tool, you can extract data from any website of your choice in an easy and swift manner. It requests no coding skills but presents a point and click interface for training the tool on the data to be extracted. Its only dependency is having a Chrome browser installed on your computer.
Data Miner.io Data Scraper
- Pricing: Starts at $19.99 per month
- Free Trials: 500 pages per month
- Data Output Format: CSV, Excel
Data Miner Chrome extension remains free for you provided you wouldn’t be scraping more than 500 pages in a month -anything more than that, and you will have to opt-inn for their paid plans. Data Miner extension requires no coding to use, and it is perfectly made for absolute beginners as it requires just clicks to scrape. Currently, this extension is available for 15,000+ website. It is important you know that Data Miner does not behave like a bot as a regular user, and as such, you do not have to worry about blocks. Data Miner automates form filling, scrapes tables with just a click, and automatically go from page to page when pagination is detected.
Scraper
- Pricing: Completely free
- Free Trials: Free
- Data Output Format: CSV, Excel TXT
Scraper is fairly unpopular when compared with the two web scrapers discussed above – it does not even have a website of its own. However, it works quite great and can extract data out of web pages and convert them into spreadsheets. This web scraper is quite simple but comes with some limitations and is free to use. The major problem associated with Scraper is that it is not beginner-friendly. The usage of Scraper requires someone to be comfortable working with XPath, and as such, it is wise to say it is for intermediate and advanced users.
Hunter.io
- Pricing: Starts at $49 per month
- Free Trials: 50 requests monthly
- Data Output Format: TXT, CSV, Excel
Hunter.io is a web scraping tool available as a Chrome extension. Unlike the others described above, Hunter.io web scraping tools are very much specialized and tailored towards crawling web pages in search of email addresses. With Hunter.io, you can find the email address of any professional or even scrape all the email addresses associated with a specific domain name. It also has an email verifier that you can use to verify the deliverability of any email address. Interestingly, over 2 million professionals are making use of this tool.
Agenty Scraping Agent
- Pricing: Free
- Free Trials: 14 days free trial – 100 pages credit
- Data Output Format: Google spreadsheet, CSV, Excel
The Agenty Scraping Agent is not a free tool and requires you to make a monetary commitment – but has a free trial option for a test. The Agenty Scraping Agent can be installed as a Chrome extension. It presents a point and click interface for training the agent on the data required. It facilitates anonymous web scraping through the use of highly anonymous proxies and automatic IP rotation. It supports batch URL crawling and even crawls websites that require a login and JavaScript-heavy websites. It keeps a history of your crawling activities and can be integrated with a good number of tools, including Google Spreadsheet, Amazon S3, and Webhook.
Conclusion
Looking at the list above, you can see that developers are already taking Chrome as a serious platform, and we expect more web scrapers to join this list. Web scrapers available as Chrome extensions are light, easy to use, and comes with free plans perfect for small web scraping projects. They are also cross-platform and works in a browser environment, which makes them perfect for web scraping.
best chrome extension for web scraping
Web scraping is the process of automating data extraction from websites on a large scale. With every field of work in the world becoming dependent on data, web scraping or web crawling methods are being increasingly used to gather data from the internet and gain insights for personal or business use. Web scraping tools and software allow you to download data in a structured CSV, Excel, or XML format and save time spent in manually copy-pasting this data. In this post, we take a look at some of the best free and paid web scraping tools and software.
Best Web Scraping Tools
- Scrapy
- ScrapeHero Cloud
- Data Scraper (Chrome Extension)
- Scraper (Chrome Extension)
- ParseHub
- OutWitHub
- Visual Web Ripper
- Import.io
- Diffbot
- Octoparse
- Web Scraper (Chrome Extension)
- FMiner
- Dexi.io
- Web Harvey
- PySpider
- Apify SDK
- Content Grabber
- Mozenda
- Kimura
- Cheerio
- NodeCrawler
- Puppeteer
- Playwright
- PJscrape
Additionally, Custom data scraping providers can be used in situations where data scraping tools and software are unable to meet the specific requirements or volume. These are easy to customize based on your scraping requirements and can be scaled up easily depending on your demand. Custom scraping can help tackle complex scraping use cases such as – Price Monitoring, Data Scraping API and more.
How to use Web Scraper Tool?
Below, we have given a brief description of the tools listed earlier and then a quick walk through about how to use these web scraping tools so that you can quickly evaluate which data scraping tool meets your requirement.Scrape Amazon Product Data for Free using ScrapeHero Cloud
Scrapy
Scrapy is an open source web scraping framework in Python used to build web scrapers. It gives you all the tools you need to efficiently extract data from websites, process them, and store them in your preferred structure and format. One of its main advantages is that it’s built on top of a Twisted asynchronous networking framework. If you have a large data scraping project and want to make it as efficient as possible with a lot of flexibility then you should definitely use this data scraping tool. You can export data into JSON, CSV and XML formats. What stands out about Scrapy is its ease of use, detailed documentation, and active community. It runs on Linux, Mac OS, and Windows systems.
ScrapeHero Cloud
ScrapeHero Cloud is a browser based web scraping platform. ScrapeHero has used its years of experience in web crawling to create affordable and easy to use pre-built crawlers and APIs to scrape data from websites such as Amazon, Google, Walmart, and more. The free trial version allows you to try out the scraper for its speed and reliability before signing up for a plan.
ScrapeHero Cloud DOES NOT require you to download any data scraping tools or software and spend time learning to use them. It is a browser based web scraper which can be used from any browser. You don’t need to know any programming skills or need to build a scraper, it is as simple as click, copy, paste and go !
In three steps you can set up a crawler – Open your browser, Create an account in ScrapeHero Cloud and select the crawler that you wish to run. Running a crawler in ScrapeHero Cloud is simple and requires you to provide the inputs and click “Gather Data” to run the crawler.
ScrapeHero Cloud crawlers allow you to to scrape data at high speeds and supports data export in JSON, CSV and Excel formats. To receive updated data, there is the option to schedule crawlers and deliver data directly to your Dropbox.
All ScrapeHero Cloud crawlers come with auto rotate proxies and the ability to run multiple crawlers in parallel. This allows you to scrape data from websites without worrying about getting blocked in a cost effective manner.
ScrapeHero Cloud provides Email support to it’s Free and Lite plan customers and Priority support to all other plans.
ScrapeHero Cloud crawlers can be customized based on customer needs as well. If you find a crawler not scraping a particular field you need, drop in an email and ScrapeHero Cloud team will get back to you with a custom plan.Get Started for FREE !Scrape data using ScrapeHero Cloud:
- Scrape Amazon Reviews
- Scrape Amazon BestSeller Listings
- Scrape Historical Twitter Data
- Scrape product data and prices from Walmart
Data Scraper
Data Scraper is a simple and free web scraping tool for extracting data from a single page into CSV and XSL data files. It is a personal browser extension that helps you transform data into a clean table format. You will need to install the plugin in a Google Chrome browser. The free version lets you scrape 500 pages per month, if you want to scrape more pages you have to upgrade to the paid plans.
Scraper
Scraper is a chrome extension for scraping simple web pages. It is a free web scraping tool which is easy to use and allows you to scrape a website’s content and upload the results to Google Docs or Excel spreadsheets. It can extract data from tables and convert it into a structured format.
Parsehub
ParseHub is a web based data scraping tool which is built to crawl single and multiple websites with the support for JavaScript, AJAX, cookies, sessions, and redirects. The application can analyze and grab data from websites and transform it into meaningful data. It uses machine learning technology to recognize the most complicated documents and generates the output file in JSON, CSV , Google Sheets or through API.
Parsehub is a desktop app available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users and works as a Firefox extension. The easy user-friendly web app can be built into the browser and has a well written documentation. It has all the advanced features like pagination, infinite scrolling pages, pop-ups, and navigation. You can even visualize the data from ParseHub into Tableau.
The free version has a limit of 5 projects with 200 pages per run. If you buy Parsehub paid subscription you can get 20 private projects with 10,000 pages per crawl and IP rotation.
OutWitHub
OutwitHub is a data extractor built in a web browser. If you wish to use the software as an extension you have to download it from Firefox add-ons store. If you want to use the data scraping tool you just need to follow the instructions and run the application. OutwitHub can help you extract data from the web with no programming skills at all. It’s great for harvesting data that might not be accessible.
OutwitHub is a free web scraping tool which is a great option if you need to scrape some data from the web quickly. With its automation features, it browses automatically through a series of web pages and performs extraction tasks. The data scraping tool can export the data into numerous formats (JSON, XLSX, SQL, HTML, CSV, etc.).
Visual Web Ripper
Visual Web Ripper is a website scraping tool for automated data scraping. The tool collects data structures from pages or search results. Its has a user friendly interface and you can export data to CSV, XML, and Excel files. It can also extract data from dynamic websites including AJAX websites. You only have to configure a few templates and web scraper will figure out the rest. Visual Web Ripper provides scheduling options and you even get an email notification when a project fails.
Import.io
With Import.io you can clean, transform and visualize the data from the web. Import.io has a point to click interface to help you build a scraper. It can handle most of the data extraction automatically. You can export data into CSV, JSON and Excel formats.
Import.io provides detailed tutorials on their website so you can easily get started with your data scraping projects. If you want a deeper analysis of the data extracted you can get Import.insights which will visualize the data in charts and graphs.
Diffbot
The Diffbot application lets you configure crawlers that can go in and index websites and then process them using its automatic APIs for automatic data extraction from various web content. You can also write a custom extractor if automatic data extraction API doesn’t work for the websites you need. You can export data into CSV, JSON and Excel formats.
Octoparse
Octoparse is a visual website scraping tool that is easy to understand. Its point and click interface allows you to easily choose the fields you need to scrape from a website. Octoparse can handle both static and dynamic websites with AJAX, JavaScript, cookies and etc. The application also offers advanced cloud services which allows you to extract large amounts of data. You can export the scraped data in TXT, CSV, HTML or XLSX formats.
Octoparse’s free version allows you to build up to 10 crawlers, but with the paid subscription plans you will get more features such as API and many anonymous IP proxies that will faster your extraction and fetch large volume of data in real time.
If you don’t like or want to code, ScrapeHero Cloud is just right for you!
Skip the hassle of installing software, programming and maintaining the code. Download this data using ScrapeHero cloud within seconds.
Web Scraper
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.
FMiner
FMiner is a visual web data extraction tool for web scraping and web screen scraping. Its intuitive user interface permits you to quickly harness the software’s powerful data mining engine to extract data from websites. In addition to the basic web scraping features it also has AJAX/Javascript processing and CAPTCHA solving. It can be run both on Windows and Mac OS and it does scraping using the internal browser. It has a 15-day freemium model till you can decide on using the paid subscription.
Dexi.io
Dexi (formerly known as CloudScrape) supports data extraction from any website and requires no download. The software application provides different types of robots in order to scrape data – Crawlers, Extractors, Autobots, and Pipes. Extractor robots are the most advanced as it allows you to choose every action the robot needs to perform like clicking buttons and extracting screenshots.
This data scraping tool offers anonymous proxies to hide your identity. Dexi.io also offers a number of integrations with third-party services. You can download the data directly to Box.net and Google Drive or export it as JSON or CSV formats. Dexi.io stores your data on its servers for 2 weeks before archiving it. If you need to scrape on a larger scale you can always get the paid version
Web Harvey
WebHarvey’s visual web scraper has an inbuilt browser that allows you to scrape data such as from web pages. It has a point to click interface which makes selecting elements easy. The advantage of this scraper is that you do not have to create any code. The data can be saved into CSV, JSON, XML files. It can also be stored in a SQL database. WebHarvey has a multi-level category scraping feature that can follow each level of category links and scrape data from listing pages.
The website scraping tool allows you to use regular expressions, offering more flexibility. You can set up proxy servers that will allow you to maintain a level of anonymity, by hiding your IP, while extracting data from websites.
PySpider
PySpider is a web crawler written in Python. It supports Javascript pages and has a distributed architecture. This way you can have multiple crawlers. PySpider can store the data on a backend of your choosing such as MongoDB, MySQL, Redis, etc. You can use RabbitMQ, Beanstalk, and Redis as message queues.
One of the advantages of PySpider is the easy to use UI where you can edit scripts, monitor ongoing tasks and view results. The data can be saved into JSON and CSV formats. If you are working with a website-based user interface, PySpider is the Internet scrape to consider. It also supports AJAX heavy websites.
Apify
Apify is a Node.js library which is a lot like Scrapy positioning itself as a universal web scraping library in JavaScript, with support for Puppeteer, Cheerio and more.
With its unique features like RequestQueue and AutoscaledPool, you can start with several URLs and then recursively follow links to other pages and can run the scraping tasks at the maximum capacity of the system respectively. Its available data formats are JSON, JSONL, CSV, XML, XLSX or HTML and available selector CSS. It supports any type of website and has built-in support of Puppeteer.
The Apify SDK requires Node.js 8 or later.
Content Grabber
Content Grabber is a visual web scraping tool that has a point-to-click interface to choose elements easily. Its interface allows pagination, infinite scrolling pages, and pop-ups. In addition, it has AJAX/Javascript processing, captcha solution, allows the use of regular expressions, and IP rotation (using Nohodo). You can export data in CSV, XLSX, JSON, and PDF formats. Intermediate programming skills are needed to use this tool.
Mozenda
Mozenda is an enterprise cloud-based web-scraping platform. It has a point-to-click interface and a user-friendly UI. It has two parts – an application to build the data extraction project and a Web Console to run agents, organize results and export data. They also provide API access to fetch data and have inbuilt storage integrations like FTP, Amazon S3, Dropbox and more.
You can export data into CSV, XML, JSON or XLSX formats. Mozenda is good for handling large volumes of data. You will require more than basic coding skills to use this tool as it has a high learning curve.
Kimurai
Kimurai is a web scraping framework in Ruby used to build scraper and extract data. It works out of the box with Headless Chromium/Firefox, PhantomJS, or simple HTTP requests and allows us to scrape and interact with JavaScript rendered websites. Its syntax is similar to Scrapy and it has configuration options such as setting a delay, rotating user agents, and setting default headers. It also uses the testing framework Capybara to interact with web pages.
Cheerio
Cheerio is a library that parses HTML and XML documents and allows you to use the syntax of jQuery while working with the downloaded data. If you are writing a web scraper in JavaScript, Cheerio API is a fast option which makes parsing, manipulating, and rendering efficient. It does not – interpret the result as a web browser, produce a visual rendering, apply CSS, load external resources, or execute JavaScript. If you require any of these features, you should consider projects like PhantomJS or JSDom.
NodeCrawler
Nodecrawler is a popular web crawler for NodeJS, making it a very fast crawling solution. If you prefer coding in JavaScript, or you are dealing with mostly a Javascript project, Nodecrawler will be the most suitable web crawler to use. Its installation is pretty simple too.
Puppeteer
Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a powerful but simple API that allows you to control Google’s headless Chrome browser. A headless browser means you have a browser that can send and receive requests but has no GUI. It works in the background, performing actions as instructed by an API. You can simulate the user experience, typing where they type and clicking where they click.
The best case to use Puppeteer for web scraping is if the information you want is generated using a combination of API data and Javascript code. Puppeteer can also be used to take screenshots of web pages visible by default when you open a web browser.
Playwright
Playwright is a Node library by Microsoft that was created for browser automation. It enables cross-browser web automation that is capable, reliable, and fast. Playwright was created to improve automated UI testing by eliminating flakiness, improving the speed of execution, and offers insights into the browser operation. It is a newer tool for browser automation and very similar to Puppeteer in many aspects and bundles compatible browsers by default. Its biggest plus point is cross-browser support – it can drive Chromium, WebKit and Firefox. Playwright has continuous integrations with Docker, Azure, Travis CI, and AppVeyor.
PJScrape
PJscrape is a web scraping framework written in Python using Javascript and JQuery. It is built to run with PhantomJS, so it allows you to scrape pages in a fully rendered, Javascript-enabled context from the command line, with no browser required. The scraper functions are evaluated in a full browser context. This means you not only have access to the DOM, but you also have access to Javascript variables and functions, AJAX-loaded content, etc.
How to Select a Web Scraping Tool?
Web scraping tools (free or paid) and self-service software/applications can be a good choice if the data requirement is small, and the source websites aren’t complicated. Web scraping tools and software cannot handle large scale web scraping, complex logic, bypassing captcha and do not scale well when the volume of websites is high. For such cases, a full-service provider is a better and economical option.
Even though these web scraping tools extract data from web pages with ease, they come with their limits. In the long run, programming is the best way to scrape data from the web as it provides more flexibility and attains better results.
If you aren’t proficient with programming or your needs are complex, or you require large volumes of data to be scraped, there are great web scraping services that will suit your requirements to make the job easier for you.
You can save time and obtain clean, structured data by trying us out instead – we are a full-service provider that doesn’t require the use of any tools and all you get is clean data without any hassles.
Conclusion
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