Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has emerged as a leading technology for automating repetitive digital tasks, and web scraping is one of the most compelling use cases. With RPA, you can build software bots to automatically navigate websites, extract key data points, and pipe that information into databases and applications—no coding required.
Compared to manually building web scrapers, RPA offers a faster, simpler, and more accessible approach to capturing web data at scale. And by applying artificial intelligence to your scraping bots, you can create self-optimizing data pipelines that continually improve over time.
Ready to supercharge your web scraping initiatives with RPA? Here‘s a rundown of the 10 best RPA tools to consider in 2021, with a focus on their web data extraction capabilities:
1. Octoparse
Built specifically for web scraping, Octoparse is a powerful yet user-friendly RPA tool that allows you to extract data from any website with just a few clicks. Its point-and-click interface makes it easy for non-technical users to automate scraping tasks. And with pre-built templates for popular sites like Amazon and Twitter, you can be capturing web data within minutes of firing up the tool.
Octoparse supports scraping data locally on your machine or in the cloud. It can also output data into various formats like Excel, HTML, and JSON, and directly integrate with databases via API. Whether you need to scrape product details, social media posts, or financial data, Octoparse provides an end-to-end solution.
2. UiPath
An enterprise RPA platform, UiPath has robust web scraping functionality. With its user-friendly visual designer, you can build bots to navigate across webpages, identify data elements, extract text and tables, take screenshots, download files, and much more. UiPath‘s bots can interact with web applications just like humans, clicking buttons, filling out forms, and extracting data along the way.
UiPath also offers AI and machine learning capabilities to make your web scraping smarter. For example, you can train bots to identify the correct data fields even if a website‘s layout changes. UiPath is trusted by many of the world‘s largest companies for mission-critical automation.
3. Automation Anywhere
Another leading enterprise RPA vendor, Automation Anywhere includes a Web Recorder feature that makes it simple to automate scraping tasks across one or multiple websites. As you manually perform actions like navigating pages and copying data, the tool automatically generates a bot to replicate those steps.
With support for JavaScript, AJAX, nested iFrames and other web technologies, Automation Anywhere can handle even the most complex and dynamic websites. It also provides error handling and analytics to ensure your scraping bots run reliably and you can monitor their performance.
4. Blue Prism
Blue Prism is an enterprise-grade RPA tool with a drag-and-drop interface for designing web automation workflows. Using its web-based Spyware tool, you can record yourself stepping through websites and specify the data elements to capture. Blue Prism will then generate a fully-functioning scraping bot that you can schedule, monitor, and maintain over time.
Blue Prism‘s AI-powered computer vision can accurately identify and extract text, images, tables, and other content – even if a website‘s HTML structure changes. The platform also boasts enterprise-class security, scalability, and audit features to meet the needs of global organizations.
5. Selenium
Selenium is actually a suite of open source tools for automating web browsers, but it‘s often used for web scraping as well. With the Selenium IDE, you can record and playback scripts to automate repetitive tasks on websites. Selenium WebDriver provides an API to build more advanced bots in various programming languages that can extract web data at scale.
While Selenium requires more technical expertise than purpose-built RPA tools, it offers developers fine-grained control and unlimited flexibility in creating custom web scraping solutions. Many enterprise testing teams already use Selenium, so it can be a cost-effective option for scraping if you have in-house skills.
6. Scrapy
Scrapy is an open source web scraping framework written in Python. So while not a traditional RPA tool, developers can use Scrapy in tandem with RPA platforms to build advanced scraping bots. With its powerful data extraction capabilities, Scrapy can tackle large-scale scraping jobs across multiple websites.
A key advantage of Scrapy is the ability to create "spiders" that crawl websites to discover and extract new URLs and data to scrape. It can output scraped data in JSON, CSV, or XML formats, and integrate with databases and data visualization tools. For companies with Python skills, Scrapy is a robust foundation for RPA-driven web scraping.
7. Puppeteer
Puppeteer is a Node.js library developed by Google that provides an API to control Chrome/Chromium browsers. Like Selenium and Scrapy, it‘s an open source foundation for building web scraping bots rather than an off-the-shelf RPA tool. But its JavaScript underpinnings make it accessible to many developers.
You can use Puppeteer in combination with RPA platforms to automate any web-based task and extract data from webpages. Its rich API allows you to generate PDFs, capture screenshots, submit forms, click buttons, extract text, scrape tables, and interact with websites like a human user.
8. Apify
Apify is a cloud-based platform for building and running web scraping and automation apps. While it‘s more of an all-in-one web scraping solution than a pure RPA tool, it deserves a mention for its powerful bot-building capabilities.
Using its simple GUI or API, you can turn any website into an API to extract structured data on-demand. Under the hood, Apify uses the Puppeteer library to drive automated Chrome browsers that can render JavaScript-heavy sites and handle CAPTCHAs and login walls. You can run your scraping bots on a schedule or trigger them programmatically.
9. Dexi.io
Dexi.io (formerly Cloudscrape) is another web scraping platform with RPA-like functionality for non-technical users. With its intuitive point-and-click bot designer, you can automate data extraction from websites without writing any code.
Dexi.io handles the entire web scraping workflow, from bot creation to job scheduling to data export and delivery. It offers plugins and integrations to capture data from password-protected sites, process scraped data, and pipe it into other applications. A cloud-hosted solution, Dexi.io abstracts away the complexity of web scraping infrastructure.
10. Mozenda
Mozenda provides end-to-end web scraping services powered by its proprietary RPA technology. For a fully managed solution, Mozenda‘s team will scope your project, build the scraping bots, run them on a schedule, and deliver the data to you in your preferred format.
Alternatively, you can use the Mozenda Studio to point-and-click your way to scraping bots without writing code. The interface allows you to indicate the specific data fields to collect and set up workflows to navigate across pages and websites. Mozenda will run your bots in the cloud and flow the extracted data into analytics databases, enterprise applications, or custom APIs.
Best Practices for RPA Web Scraping
While RPA tools make it easy to automate web scraping, there are some best practices to keep in mind as you build your bots:
- Always respect the terms of service of any website you scrape, and avoid scraping any copyrighted or sensitive data without permission
- Set a reasonable crawl rate and build in delay times between requests to avoid overloading web servers or triggering rate limits
- Rotate user agent strings and IP addresses to minimize the chances of your bots being detected and blocked
- Use a headless browser or headless mode if available to render dynamic content but avoid consuming too many server resources
- Build in error handling, logging, and alerting to monitor bot performance and gracefully handle any issues like network outages or website changes
- Regularly audit and maintain your scraping bots to ensure they continue functioning as intended, especially if website layouts change
- Carefully consider data storage and retention to comply with any applicable regulations like GDPR, and ensure scraped data is secured
By following these guidelines, you can create robust and responsible web scraping bots using RPA technology. Always weigh the business value of the web data you‘re extracting against the costs and risks involved.
Conclusion
Web scraping is an increasingly vital data collection strategy, and RPA tools provide a powerful and accessible way to automate the process. Whether you opt for an enterprise platform like UiPath, a dedicated web scraping tool like Octoparse, or an open source framework like Scrapy, RPA can help you extract web data at scale—no coding required.
Before diving in, consider your specific web scraping needs and in-house skill sets. For non-technical business users, tools with visual bot designers are ideal. Developers may prefer RPA tools with APIs or open source libraries for maximum control. Factor in your budget and deployment preferences as well.
Whichever RPA approach you choose, remember that web scraping is both an art and a science. Following best practices will help you create bots that deliver accurate data and run reliably over time. With the right RPA tool and techniques, you‘ll be well on your way to automated web data collection.