10+ Best Web Scraping Tools (Free & Paid)

Web scraping tools are like the unsung heroes of modern business. Think about it—everyone’s scrambling for data, and these tools just swoop in, grab info from all over the internet, and make your life way easier. You wanna dig into market trends? Spy on competitor prices? Maybe just keep tabs on what’s hot and what’s not? Scraping’s got your back.

Now, we’ll dive into the top web scrapers, what they’re good (or not-so-good) at, and toss in some tips so you’re not just throwing darts in the dark. Buckle up—let’s get into it.

Web scraping tools are like your own little internet minions. They just zip around websites, grab the info you want, and toss it into a nice, tidy spreadsheet or whatever format floats your boat. Forget about wasting hours copy-pasting stuff until your eyes go blurry. Let the bots do the grunt work while you kick back or binge-watch another show.

Some web scraping tools are now simple. They allow you to point and choose the data you want, therefore requiring little or no coding skills. Meanwhile, other advanced tools give you full control over your code by leveraging programming libraries like BeautifulSoup, Selenium, or Crawlee. 

Whether your tool choice, a web scraper still helps you collect different types of web data. They range from structured data (names, product prices, currency exchange rates) and text content (blog posts, news updates, comments on social media) to images and video.

Why is Scraping Web Data so Important?

The internet is basically an ocean of random info—most of it messy, scattered all over the place, and in about a thousand different formats. If you actually want to find something useful, sifting through that by hand is a nightmare, especially since sites (like Amazon) update their stuff every five seconds. That’s where web scraping steps in and saves your sanity. It scoops up the data you need, straight from almost any site, and does it way faster than any human ever could. Seriously, it’s a lifesaver if you don’t wanna drown in the chaos.

One recent research indicated that the top extracted data types include product prices (34.8%), social media content (26.1%), news articles (21.7%), and customer reviews (13%). Such information reflects the significance of web scraping in spotting market trends, conducting market research, and performing sentiment analysis. The derived insights help companies improve their marketing strategies and campaigns, as well as enhance their products to retain and attract customers.

Now, let’s dive into our curated list of the best web scraping tools. The list covers both free and paid solutions. 

Free Web Scraping Tools

1. Goutte

Goutte is basically an open-source PHP tool that lets you mess around with web crawling and scraping. It’s super handy if you’re trying to snag data off websites without losing your mind. It’s got a chill API that makes stuff like filling out forms, clicking around on pages, or yanking info from HTML and XML. If you’re scraping sites with PHP, you’ll probably bump into Goutte easily.

Key features:

• Goutte is easy to use and focuses on the essentials of web scraping without unnecessary complexity. 
• It integrates seamlessly with Guzzle, a popular PHP HTTP client, to process web requests and responses. This combination makes Goutte flexible enough in more complex scraping cases. 
• Goutte’s `filter()` helps you search for elements in the DOM (the structured tree of elements making up the HTML page, like <div>, <h1>, etc.) by using CSS selectors. Meanwhile, its `filterXPath()` allows for XPath-based selections, and the `text()` method helps pull out the content of each element. 
• Goutte makes web scraping mimic real browsing behavior, facilitating form submission and link following.

Limitations: 

• Goutte doesn’t support JavaScript. This means this web scraping tool can’t directly pull out content loaded dynamically via AJAX requests or client-side scripting. 
• It only works well in PHP environments. If you’re not familiar with PHP, use BeautifulSoup or Scrapy instead.
• Goutte isn’t ideal for large-scale scraping tasks that require high concurrency or distributed crawling. For massive projects, you should choose Scrapy or Puppeteer. 

When to use: 

• Use Goutte if you’re already developing apps with PHP frameworks (e.g., Symfony or Laravel).
• Great for static website scraping. This is because Goutte doesn’t depend on a browser engine like Selenium or Puppeteer, making it faster and less resource-consuming.

2. Scrapy

Scrapy is an open-source web scraping framework using Python. It’s a complete toolkit that helps you build web crawlers and take care of some complex tasks, like managing request queues, managing cookies & user agents, and processing proxies & middleware. This allows developers to focus on writing scraping logic rather than building everything from scratch.

Key features:

• Scrapy uses spiders (crawlers) to crawl a website and pull data with little supervision. Spiders contain rules to follow links and parse the web page’s content. Scrapy can run various spiders at once and even scale across distributed systems.
• Scrapy comes with asynchronous networking to send multiple requests simultaneously instead of delivering one by one. This helps it crawl thousands of pages faster.
• The tool uses built-in middleware to deal with things like rate limiting, cookies, user agents, or retries. 
• Scrapy uses a modular architecture that allows you to integrate custom pipelines, middlewares, or third-party libraries. This flexibility helps you control your scraping process at a granular level. 

Limitations:

• Scrapy doesn’t interpret JavaScript. So, for JavaScript-heavy websites, you need to combine Scrapy with other tools like Splash (a headless browser) or leverage Selenium and Playwright instead.  
• Scrapy has a steep learning curve. This means you have to understand Python, web scraping principles, and asynchronous programming to use the tool effectively.

When to use:

• Use Scrapy if you want a scalable and efficient tool to extract large amounts of data with Python. But avoid it if you prefer a beginner-friendly tool or retrieving from JavaScript-based websites.

3. Playwright

Playwright is a powerful browser automation and testing framework developed by Microsoft. The library helps open web pages, click buttons, type text, extract data, take screenshots, and even work with various pages simultaneously. It supports many programming languages, like Python, JavaScript (with Node.js), Java, and .NET (C#). 

Key features:

• Playwright allows you to control real browsers (like Firefox, Chromium, or WebKit) programmatically. 
• The web scraping tool can extract from dynamic websites that load JavaScript content.
• Playwright automates various browser tabs/pages at once.
• It can sometimes bypass simple CAPTCHAs.
• The library facilitates the configuration of proxies for evading anti-scraping measures.
• Playwright enables you to block, adjust, or manage HTTP requests/responses (e.g., skip images or change headers).

Limitations:

• Playwright drives real browsers, so it consumes more CPU/memory than lightweight scrapers (e.g., Scrapy or Goutte).
• The library is more complex than beginner-friendly tools (e.g., BeautifulSoup), especially when working with async code.

When to use:

• Playwright is ideal if you want to scrape JavaScript-heavy websites or perform cross-browser testing with the same codebase.
• The library works best for automating real browser interactions, like logins, form submissions, or clicks. 
• Don’t use Playwright if you need to extract from static HTML pages or at a very large scale, as its browser overhead may be expensive compared to async HTTP-based scrapers.

4. WebScraper.io 

WebScraper.io is basically for everyone, whether you’re a total newbie or you actually know your way around code. It’s just a Chrome extension, so you slap it onto your browser, and you’re off to the races. Now, is it as hardcore as something like Scrapy? Not really, but it gets the job done if you’re not trying to download half the internet or build some crazy automation setup.

Key features:

• You don’t need to know a single line of code when working with WebScraper. Just click on whatever you want to grab, and then, it figures out the rest. 
• The tool lets you build sitemaps to it which pages to hit and what info to get.
• It easily deals with modern websites that use JavaScript or AJAX. 
• Data export is easy with WebScraper by extracting straight from your browser into a CSV or using its cloud thing and snatch your data as CSV, Excel, JSON—whatever works. Further, you can even hook it up to Dropbox, S3, Google Sheets, APIs, and webhooks.
• It’ll run on autopilot for you. With WebScraper, you can run scrapes automatically based on schedules and use IP rotation to avoid blocks.  

Limitations:

• WebScraper only works on Google Chrome and doesn’t offer cross-browser support.
• Its free plan is limited to how much you can scrape. For large-scale or cloud-based scraping projects, you need to upgrade to a paid plan. 

When to use:

• WebScraper.io is ideal if you’re a beginner who requires a quick, no-code way to pull out web data directly from browsers. But you need to move to a paid plan or a more powerful tool if you want advanced features or large-scale scraping.

Freemium and Trial Web Scraping Tools

5. Octoparse

Octoparse is a no-code web scraping solution. It offers a wide range of tools to simplify your scraping process, while still giving you full control over your scraping tasks. 

Key features:

• Octoparse makes web scraping way less painful—even if you’re totally new to the game. With its Smart Mode and Wizard Mode, you basically just click around, pick what you want, and boom, it sets everything up for you. There are even plug-and-play templates, like that Twitter Scraper Template, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time.  
• Octoparse integrates AI directly into its scraping function. Features like Auto-detect can automatically identify patterns on a web page (e.g., product items, lists, or reviews) and guide you with real-time tips. This helps even beginners to get started faster and avoid making mistakes.  
• The tool helps you manage the entire process with automation. In particular, you can schedule scrapers to run automatically at specific times or run 24/7 in the cloud without keeping your computer on. These scrapers also automate data exporting and connect with other tools through the OpenAI integration. 
• Octoparse comes stacked with IP rotation, proxy support, and even CAPTCHA busting. So, you spend less time getting blocked and more time actually collecting the data you came for. 
• The tool supports XPath to help you pull specific elements with high precision.

Limitations:

• Using advanced features like XPath requires beginners to have prior knowledge.

Pricing (billed monthly):

• Free for up to 10 tasks (saved workflows for web scraping)
• Standard: start from $69/month for 100 tasks
• Professional: start from $249/month for 250 tasks
• Enterprise (contact sales) for 750+ tasks

Note: All the paid plans come with a 7-day free trial.

6. ParseHub

ParseHub is a web scraping tool that offers a click-based interface to help beginners pull web data without coding knowledge. Further, it supports more advanced scraping needs through automation features.

Key features:

• You can get data from any website, even JavaScript and AJAX pages. Further, you can easily guide ParseHub to do tricky parts, like searching through forms, opening dropdowns, clicking on maps, logging to websites, and handling infinite scroll, tabs, or pop-ups to extract data.
• ParseHub comes with the machine learning relationship engine to scan web pages, understand the hierarchy of elements, and pull data in Excel and JSON formats. This removes the need for coding from scratch.
• The tool has regular expressions to clean text and HTML before downloading the data. It also allows you to schedule scrapers to run automatically and use IP rotation to avoid detection and blocking when scraping websites with strict controls. 

Limitations:

• Scrapers run on your devices, so scaling up requires more hardware.
• Deep customization or enterprise-level scaling is limited compared to coding your own scrapers or using dedicated scraping APIs.

Pricing:

• Free for 200 pages per run
• Standard: $189/month for 10K pages per run
• Professional: $599/month for unlimited pages per run
• ParseHub Plus (contact sales)

7. Apify

Apify is a full-stack web scraping and automation platform that allows you to retrieve, convert, and automate data extraction from websites without the need to install your own infrastructure. With Apify, you can build, run, and share web scrapers or automation tasks (called Actors) at scale. 

Key features:

• Apify offers 6,000 pre-built Actors to scrape websites, automate the web, and feed AI with web data. Some typical Actors on Apify’s marketplace include Instagram Scraper, Google Maps Scraper, and Website Content Crawler. Beyond these pre-built templates, you can use JavaScript, Python, and TypeScript to build your own or have experts build and maintain custom web scraping solutions on your behalf. 
• You can export scraped data in various formats, like CSV, Excel, or JSON, or directly to databases and APIs. The data is then put in Google Sheets, Zapier, Make, and other integrations. 
• Apify can mimic human browsing (e.g., clicking, scrolling, logging in, or interacting with forms). This capability makes it useful for process automation, like filling forms, tracking websites, or running bots.
• It provides automatic IP rotation with Apify Proxy. Further, its anti-blocking tools help bypass rate limits, CAPTCHAs, and anti-scraping measures.
• You can run scrapers automatically on schedule and build workflows where one actor feeds into another.

Limitations:

• Its performance depends on the proxy network and target site.
• Apify is best for batch scraping, but it’s not ideal for real-time streaming data (e.g., monitoring changing stock prices).

Pricing:

• Free
• Starter: $39/month
• Scale: $199/month
• Business: $999/month
• Custom (contact sales)

8. ZenRows

ZenRows is a cloud-based web scraping API and automation tool. It simplifies web data retrieval and removes common challenges, such as proxy management, JavaScript rendering, and anti-bot detection. 

Key features:

• ZenRows comes with a universal scraper API to process JavaScript rendering, IP rotation, browser fingerprinting, and anti-bot detection. Further, it offers pre-configured API endpoints customized to specific industries, like e-commerce, real estate, or SERPs. 
• It integrates seamlessly with existing Playwright or Puppeteer workflows through a single connection URL. Additionally, it allows you to access a global network of residential proxies (55M+ IPs across 190+ countries). 
• ZenRows has a developer-friendly dashboard with clean APIs for session control, rendering wait options, custom headers, JSON output, and structured data parsing. 

Limitations:

• ZenRows doesn’t support deep customization. So, if you want granular control over proxies, scripting workflows, or complex login flows, ZenRows isn’t a good option.
• Its auto-parsing feature is powerful, yet limited to supported websites. Parsing will fail and require manual intervention if the site’s structure changes.
• ZenRows has a steep learning curve for non-developers.

Pricing:

• Free
• Developer: $69/month
• Startup: $129/month
• Business: $299/month
• Enterprise (contact sales)

Paid Web Scraping Tools Only

9. Bright Data

Bright Data (formerly Luminati Networks) is one of the world’s leading platforms in proxy services, web data extraction, and automated scraping. It enables your business to scrape websites in a large-scale, compliant, and ethical way. 

Key features:

• Bright Data offers a diverse proxy network of more than 150 million IP addresses that cover residential, datacenter, ISP, and mobile proxies. It also enables geo-targeting at the ZIP code or city level.
• Bright Data has high uptime (~99.99%) and strong success rates (99.95% for residential proxies). Its response time is also fast, with roughly 0.7 seconds for residential and 0.24 seconds for datacenter proxies.
• The platform automates complex scraping tasks and bypasses restrictions with advanced tools, such as Web Scraper API, Web Unlocker API, etc. It also comes with a Proxy Manager app, comprehensive REST APIs, and browser extensions to monitor proxies programmatically.
• Bright Data’s marketplace offers pre-built or custom datasets and a Web Scraper IDE to create scrapers directly in its cloud.

Limitations:

• Bright Data might be complex for beginners.
• The platform isn’t ideal for basic or lightweight scraping tasks.

Pricing: Its pricing plans vary depending on its web access APIs, data feeds, insights, and proxy infrastructure.

10. ScrapingBee

ScrapingBee is a web scraping API that handles common challenges to help you pull the essential web data from your preferred websites. You can interact with it through easy API calls and get structured data or content in return. 

Key features:

• ScrapingBee manages thousands of headless instances through the latest Chrome version. 
• It renders JavaScript to scrape any web page, even single-page applications using React, AngularJS, Vue.js, and other libraries. You can build custom scraping requests or scripts to process complex JavaScript cases and tailor the scraping process.
• The platform automatically rotates residential/datacenter proxies and comes with anti-bot measures (like CAPTCHA solving) to reduce blocks and bypass strict protections like Cloudflare. 
• ScrapingBee uses AI to identify the relevant content based on your description and return it in a structured data format. 
• It offers rich API & SDK support for Python and Node.js. Further, it supports HTTPS encryption, IP whitelisting, usage monitoring, and a dashboard with logging and a test console. 

Limitations:

• You may find SpringBee restrictive and documentation lacking for complex tasks (e.g., crawling through Amazon’s pagination).
• ScrapingBee is purely API-based, making it hard for beginners.
• Some users report difficulty when extracting PDF content directly via ScrapingBee.

Pricing:

• Freelance: $49/month (for 250K API credits)
• Startup: $99/month (for 1M API credits)
• Business: $249/month (for 3M API credits)
• Business+: $599/month (for 8M API credits)

11. Mozenda

Mozenda is a cloud-based web scraping tool designed specifically for enterprises. It extracts large amounts of data from websites without the need to build custom scrapers from scratch. Mozenda is self-serve, which means businesses can perform scraping tasks themselves using Mozenda’s tools.

Key features:

• Mozenda handles large-scale scraping tasks and supports on-premise hosting if your business wants to run it within your own infrastructure. 
• It offers a no-code interface that allows non-technical users to set up scrapers, then point and click the data they want to extract.
• The tool exports data in various formats (CSV, Excel, XML, and databases) and integrates it with other services.
• It offers strong customer support through phone and email.

Limitations:

• High price, as Mozenda targets large enterprises 

Pricing: Start at $250/month with a 14-day free trial

12. ScraperAPI

ScraperAPI helps developers build web scrapers without concerning the technical complexities of proxies, CAPTCHAs, and browser automation. It does this by using a simple API call to extract the raw HTML from any website. This makes scraping faster, smoother, and less error-prone. 

Key features:

• ScrapeAPI has a huge proxy pool as well as special proxies for challenging use cases (like e-commerce, social media, or search engines).  Further, its smart IP rotation system only switches proxies if needed, hence minimizing proxy costs. 
• It comes with smart routing logic that spreads requests across multiple networks (subnets) to avoid detection and blocking. 
• The tool uses automatic throttling to prevent CAPTCHAs and website overloading. 
• ScrapeAPI can bypass advanced anti-bot systems (e.g., PerimeterX or DataDome), which block many scrapers. 
• The tool uses DataPipeline (for scheduled recurring scraping) and Async Scraper (for large volumes) to handle requests at scale.
• It returns clean, structured data. This saves time on cleaning and parsing.

Limitations:

• Compared to other competitors, ScrapeAPI has fewer structured data endpoints. So you need extra parsing yourself in some use cases.

Pricing: All the following paid plans come with a 7-day free trial

• Hobby: $49/month for 100K API credits
• Startup: $149/month for 1M API credits
• Business: $299/month for 3M API credits
• Scaling: $475/month for 5M API credits
• Enterprise (contact sales)

13. Import.io

Import.io is a cloud-based web data extraction tool that helps you collect structured data from websites, especially e-commerce ones, without the need to write code. It supports scalable scraping and allows you to retrieve data from thousands of sites at once.

Key features:

• Import.io has a point-and-click interface where users can choose data visually. It also comes with AI to extract what you want and minimize manual configuration. 
• The platform is customized for specific industries like retail, e-commerce, travel, or ticketing. It also offers managed services and expert support for more complex scraping tasks. 
• You can schedule scrapers to run periodically and capture regularly changing data. 
• It supports data outputs in different formats and integrates with various analytics services like Tableau.

Limitations:

• High costs
• Import.io struggles with handling complex tasks like infinite scrolling, AJAX-heavy sites, dropdown navigation, or sophisticated logic workflows.

Pricing: Starts from $199/month

Choosing a suitable web scraper depends on many factors, including your purpose, technical skills, budget constraints, and the website types you want to scrape. Below is what to do if you want to pick the best one. 

1. Identify your needs

If you target basic, one-time, or small-scale scraping, choose simple point-and-click scrapers like ParseHub or Octoparse. But if your scraping project is long-term and large-scale, pick scalable tools, such as Apify, ScraperAPI, or Bright Data. Beyond the project scope, you should consider other crucial factors by asking yourself:

• Should a scraper target specific industries (e.g., e-commerce or retail)?
• What types of data do you want to collect (e.g., product details or prices)?
• Which existing issues does the data help address (e.g., market research, brand identity protection, or price comparison)?
• Who is the main user of a web scraper (e.g., researchers, marketing executives, or developers)? What are their technical skills?

2. Check features matching your needs

Once you have identified your needs, make a curated list of web scrapers with features that fit these purposes. For example, if you want to handle dynamic websites (JavaScript-heavy), choose tools with headless browsers or JavaScript rendering like ScrapingBee or Apify. In case you want to avoid bans or CAPTCHAs, opt for some services with proxy rotation and CAPTCHA solving, like Bright Data, ScraperAPI, or ZenRows. 

3. Consider pricing and scale 

Don’t select web scraping tools whose pricing plans exceed your budget and that fail to meet your scalability demand (if any). For example, if you have a tight budget and want to test your scraping strategy before committing to a paid or premium plan, choose tools like ParseHub, Octoparse, or open-source libraries (e.g., BeautifulSoup). But if you require enterprise-scale scraping, premium platforms with strong infrastructure like Bright Data or Mozenda are better options. 

4. Know the limitations 

Each web scraping tool has its own challenges. Consider whether these limitations hinder your scraping process. If yes, you can filter out or remove it from the shortlisted candidates. 

5. Conduct a pilot project 

Even when your chosen web scraper includes everything you need for seamless scraping projects, it doesn’t mean they will run perfectly in real-world use cases. That’s why you should try them in a small-scale scraping project with some small tasks to test whether they work as expected before expanding their deployment. Also, ensure the providers will offer immediate or convenient support via email, phone, or chat to help you deal with technical challenges when needed.

FAQs:

Is web scraping illegal?

Web scraping is not inherently illegal, as this process only focuses on retrieving publicly available data. However, legal issues would appear if you extract copyrighted content and personal data, then reuse it without consent. This translates to violating data protection laws. Besides, web scraping is also considered illegal if you cause harm (e.g., DDoS-style scraping) and violate a website’s Terms of Service (ToS), which bans automated scraping. So, to keep web scraping legal, you should only stick to public, non-sensitive data, respect robots.txt, and avoid scraping copyrighted or personal data without permission.

How do I scrape 99% of websites?

It’s quite challenging to scrape 99% of websites because some sites have anti-bot protections. To maximize the success rate of web scraping, you can choose web scrapers that offer headless browsers/JS rendering, proxy rotation, CAPTCHA solving, and other features to get the highest coverage.

Can AutoGPT do web scraping?

AutoGPT is an open, experimental AI agent that uses large language models (LLMs) to autonomously perform complex tasks. Unlike chatbots working based on constant prompts, AutoGPT divides a complex task into smaller subtasks and uses tools to implement them. 

With this capability, AutoGPT can scrape websites, but with limits. In other words, the tool itself can’t scrape, but requires integrations with libraries (e.g., BeautifulSoup or Scrape) or scraping APIs (e.g., Apify or ScraperAPI). Further, AutoGPT works best in small-scale scraping, but is not optimized for automating large-scale, enterprise-grade workflows.

Which AI tool is best for web scraping?

It’s hard to define the “best” AI tool for web scraping, as each comes with pros and cons. For example, Apify allows you to build scraping Actors and integrates well with AI pipelines, while ScrapingBee uses AI to look for the content based on your descriptions. Therefore, ask yourself what problems AI will help you with. The answer helps you identify the most suitable AI tool for web scraping.