Web scraping tools are a great alternative to extract data from web pages. In this post, we will share with you the most popular web scraping tools to extract data. With these automated data scrapers…
Open Source has fueled a massive part of the technology boom we are all experiencing. Even in the world of web scraping, open source web scraping tools play a large part to help gather data from the Internet. We will walk through open source web scraping frameworks and tools that are great for crawling, scraping the web, and parsing out the data.
Here is a comparison chart showing the important features of all the best open source web scraper frameworks and tools that we will go through in this post:
Features/Tools | Github Stars | Github Forks | Github Open Issues | Last Updated | Documentation | License |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Scrapy | 37.4K | 8.6K | 443 | April 2020 | Excellent | BSD License |
PySpider | 14.4K | 3.5K | 250 | April 2018 | Good | Apache License 2.0 |
MechanicalSoup | 3.5K | 310 | 22 | June 2020 | Average | MIT |
Portia | 7.8K | 1.3K | 100 | June 2019 | Good | BSD License |
NodeCrawler | 5.4K | 829 | 24 | Nov 2014 | Good | BSD 2-Clause |
Apify SDK | 2.4K | 155 | 75 | June 2020 | Good | Apache License 2.0 |
Selenium | 17.9K | 5.7K | 349 | Dec 2018 | Good | Apache License 2.0 |
Puppeteer | 62.2K | 6.4K | 1.1K | June 2020 | Good | Apache License 2.0 |
Heritrix | 1.8K | 659 | 33 | May 2020 | Good | Apache License 2.0 |
Apache Nutch | 2.1K | 1.2K | 443 | June 2020 | Excellent | Apache License 2.0 |
Jaunt | 37.4K | 8.6K | – | June 2016 | Excellent | Apache License 2.0 |
StormCrawler | 659 | 212 | 33 | June 2020 | Good | Apache License 2.0 |
Webscraper.io | 39 | 20 | 5 | April 2020 | Good | Webscraper.io |
Web Harvest | – | 1 | – | Feb 2010 | Average | N/A |
These are the best Open Source web scraper tools available in each language or platform :
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 as you want, 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 web scraping project and want to make it as efficient as possible with a lot of flexibility then you should definitely use Scrapy.
Scrapy is under BSD license.
Requires Version – Python 2.7, 3.4+
Available Selectors – CSS, XPath
Available Data Formats – CSV, JSON, XML
Pros
- Suitable for broad crawling
- Easy setup and detailed documentation
- Active Community
Cons
- Since it is a full-fledged framework, it is not beginner friendly
- Does not handle JavaScript
MechanicalSoup
MechanicalSoup is a python library that is designed to simulate the behavior of a human using a web browser and built around the parsing library BeautifulSoup. If you need to scrape data from simple sites or if heavy scraping is not required, using MechanicalSoup is a simple and efficient method. MechanicalSoup automatically stores and sends cookies, follows redirects and can follow links and submit forms.
It’s best to use MechanicalSoup when interacting with a website that doesn’t provide a web service API, out of a browser. If the website provides a web service API, then you should use this API and you don’t need MechanicalSoup. If the website relies on JavaScript, then you probably need a fully-fledged browser, like Selenium.MechanicalSoup is licensed under MIT.
Requires Version – Python 3.0+
Available Selectors – CSS, XPath
Available Data Formats – CSV, JSON, XML
Pros
- Preferred for fairly simple websites
Cons
- Does not handle JavaScript
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 its easy to use UI where you can edit scripts, monitor ongoing tasks and view results. If you are working with a website-based user interface, PySpider is the Internet scrape to consider. It also supports AJAX heavy websites. To know more about PySpider, you can check out their documentation and or their community resources. It’s currently licensed under Apache License 2.0.
Requires Version – Python 2.6+, Python 3.3+
Available Selectors – CSS, XPath
Available Data Formats – CSV, JSON
Pros
- Facilitates more comfortable and faster scraping
- Powerful UI
Cons
- Difficult to deploy
Portia
Portia is a visual scraping tool and the best web scraper created by Scrapinghub that does not require any programming knowledge. If you are not a developer, its best to go straight with Portia for your web scraping needs. You can try Portia for free without needing to install anything, all you need to do is sign up for an account at Scrapinghub and you can use their hosted version.
Making a crawler in Portia and extracting web contents is very simple if you do not have programming skills. You won’t need to install anything as Portia runs on the web page. With Portia, you can use the basic point-and-click tools to annotate the data you wish to extract, and based on these annotations Portia will understand how to scrape data from similar pages. Once the pages are detected Portia will create a sample of the structure you have created. Actions such as click, scroll, wait are all simulated by recording and replaying user actions on a page.Portia is great to crawl Ajax powered based websites (when subscribed to Splash) and should work fine with heavy Javascript frameworks like Backbone, Angular, and Ember. It filters the pages it visits for an efficient crawl. Its currently licensed under BSD license.
Requirements – If you are using Linux you will need Docker installed or if you are using a Windows or Mac OS machine you will need boot2docker.
Available Selectors – CSS, XPath
Available Data Formats – CSV, JSON, XML
Pros
- Defines CSS or XPath selectors
- Filters the page it visits
Cons
- Quite time-consuming as compared to other open source tools
- Navigating websites are difficult to control. You always need to start the crawl with the target pages, else Portia will visit unnecessary pages and may lead to unwanted results
Apify SDK
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.
Requirements – The Apify SDK requires Node.js 8 or later
Available Selectors – CSS
Available Data Formats – JSON, JSONL, CSV, XML, Excel or HTMLPros
- Supports any type of website
- Best library for web crawling in Javascript we have tried so far.
- Built-in support of Puppeteer
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. JSDOM and Cheerio (used for HTML parsing) use it for server-side rendering, with JSDOM being more robust.
Requires Version – Node v4.0.0 or greater
Available Selectors – CSS, XPath
Available Data Formats – CSV, JSON, XML
Pros
- Easy installation
Cons
- It has no Promise support
Selenium Web Driver
When it comes to websites that use very complex and dynamic code, it’s better to have all the page content rendered using a browser first. Selenium WebDriver uses a real web browser to access the website, so it would like its activity wouldn’t look any different from a real person accessing information in the same way. When you load a page using Web Driver, the browser loads all the web resources and executes the javascript on the page. At the same time, it stores all the cookies created by websites and sends complete HTTP headers as all browsers do. This makes it very hard to determine whether a real person accesses the website or if its a bot.
Although it’s mostly used for testing, WebDriver can be used for scraping dynamic web pages. It is the right solution if you want to test if a website works properly with various browsers or Javascript-heavy websites. Using WebDriver makes web scraping easier, but the scraping process is much slower as compared to simple HTTP request to the web browser. When you are using the WebDriver, the browser waits until the whole page is loaded and then can you only access the elements. Selenium has a very large and active community which is great for beginners.
Requires Version – Python 2.7 and 3.5+ and provides bindings for languages Javascript, Java, C, Ruby, and Python.
Available Selectors – CSS, XPath
Available Data Formats – Customizable
Pros
- Suitable for scraping heavy Javascript websites
- Large and active community
- Detailed documentation, making it easy to grasp for beginners
Cons
- Hard to maintain when there are any changes in the website structure
- High CPU and memory usage
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 truly 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. A headless browser is a great tool for automated testing and server environments where you don’t need a visible UI shell. For example, you may want to run some tests against a real web page, create a PDF of it, or just inspect how the browser renders a URL. Puppeteer can also be used to take screenshots of web pages visible by default when you open a web browser.Puppeteer’s API is very similar to Selenium WebDriver, but works only with Google Chrome, while WebDriver works with most popular browsers. Puppeteer has a more active support than Selenium, so if you are working with Chrome, Puppeteer is your best option for web scraping.
Requires Version – Node v6.4.0, Node v7.6.0 or greater
Available Selectors – CSS
Available Data Formats – JSON
Pros
- With its full-featured API, it covers a majority of use cases
- The best option for scraping Javascript websites on Chrome
Cons
- Only available for Chrome
- Supports only JSON format
Heritirix

Requires Versions – Java 5.0+
Available Selectors – XPath, CSS
Available Data Formats – ARC file
Pro
- Excellent user documentation and easy setup
- Mature and stable platform.
- Good performance and decent support for distributed crawls
- Respects robot.txt
- Supports broad and focused crawls
Cons
- Not dynamically scalable
Apache Nutch

Requirements – Java 8
Available Selectors – XPath, CSS
Available Data Formats – JSON, CSV, XML
Pros
- Highly extensible and Flexible system
- Open-source web-search software, built on Lucene Java
- Dynamically scalable with Hadoop
Cons
- Difficult to setup
- Poor documentation
- Some operations take longer, as the size of crawler grows
Jaunt

Requirements – Java 7
Available Selectors – Jaunt has its own syntax
Available Data Formats – XML, JSON
Pros
- Because it’s lightweight, it’s relatively easy to scale such as using one UserAgent per thread.
- Don’t need to rely too heavily on CSS and XPath selectors
- Provides high-level components for common web scraping tasks
- Good for DOM level operations, when Javascript support is not required
Cons
- Does not support Javascript
- Free version lasts only for one month
StormCrawler
Requirements – Apache Maven, Java 7
Available Selectors – XPath
Available Data Formats – JSON, CSV, XML
Pros
- Appropriate for large scale recursive crawls
- Suitable for Low latency web crawling
Cons
- Does not support document deduplication
Webscraper.io
Web scraper, a standalone chrome extension, is a great web scraping tool for extracting data from dynamic web pages. Using the extension you can create a sitemap to 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 or into CouchDB.
The advantage of webscraper.io is that you just need basic coding skills. If you aren’t proficient with programming or need large volumes of data to be scraped, Webscraper.io will make the job easier for you. The extension requires Chrome 31+ and has no OS limitations.You can download and add the extension to Chrome using the link – https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/web-scraper/jnhgnonknehpejjnehehllkliplmbmhn?hl=en
Required Version – Chrome 31+
Available Selectors – CSS
Available Data Formats – CSV
Pros
- Best Google Chrome extension for basic web scraping from websites into CSV format
- Easy to install, learn and understand
Cons
- It cannot be used if you have complex web scraping scenarios such as bypassing CAPTCHA, submitting forms, etc.
Web Harvest

Requires Version – Java 1.5+
Available Selectors – XPath
Available Data Formats – JSON, XML
Pros
- Good for beginners
- Can easily implement Java libraries
Cons
- Versions are not updated frequently compared to other frameworks
_______________________________________________________________________________________These are just some of the open-source web scraping tools and frameworks you can use for your web scraping projects. If you have greater scraping requirements or would like to scrape on a much larger scale it’s better to use web scraping services.If you aren’t proficient with programming or your needs are complex, or you need 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 get 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.
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