Free web scrapers for big data

What are the challenges with big data and why does web scraping matter?

Suppose you're gathering daily headlines from media sources. You can start by copying and pasting the titles of news articles from various websites, but what if you want to get large amounts of data as quickly as possible? Like hundreds of thousands of data to train an artificial intelligence engine? If that is the case, copying and pasting would take up most of your time. This is where web scraping comes in. Unlike manual data extraction, web scraping can automate the process of collecting information and even millions of data sets from the web in a short period. One more, how data is structured is key to AI and ML system performances, and if you use web scraping you can solve such problems as well.

Web scraping for big data

Top 5 free web scrapers

Without further ado, here are five free web scrapers that will help you collect large volumes of data:

1

Listly — http://www.listly.io/

Listly is a browser extension that simplifies web scraping without coding, helping you collect and export enormous volumes of data into either Excel or Google Sheets. It currently provides Free, Light, Business, and Enterprise plans (see Pricing: https://www.listly.io/pricing), and supports multiple languages, including English, Korean, Chinese, Spanish, and more.

• Pros: User-friendly Point-and-Click interface, Scheduler, Tabs (e.g. extract data from multiple open tabs), Pay As You Go pricing, enterprise-level solutions, and more!

• Cons: Usage limit of 10 URLs per day on the Free plan

2

Instant Data Scraper — https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/instant-data-scraper/ofaokhiedipichpaobibbnahnkdoiiah?hl=en-US

Instant Data Scraper is a web extension for web scraping. It is completely free, and commonly used for SEO, recruiting, sales lead generation, or email marketing campaigns.

• Pros: Free

• Cons: Limited in-person support

3

Octoparse — https://www.octoparse.com/

A no-code web scraping tool with a visual interface that makes it easy to extract data without programming skills.

• Pros: Cloud-based extraction, various export options, 14-day free trial

• Cons: Learning curve for beginners, complexity for advanced users due to its code-centric interfaces

4

Diffbot — https://www.diffbot.com/

Diffbot provides a web scraping API with AI-driven data extraction solutions.

• Pros: AI-driven data extraction, support for students (Diffbot for Students)

• Cons: High cost for small teams

5

ParseHub — https://www.parsehub.com/

ParseHub is a tool for visual data extraction, which uses a point-and-click interface to help users scrape websites with ease.

• Pros: Intuitive point-and-click interface

• Cons: Export limitations (e.g. there may be restrictions on export formats or data volume depending on the plan)