Web scraping has exploded in popularity as a way to gather business intelligence, monitor competitors, generate leads, and build large datasets for machine learning. According to a 2020 study by Grand View Research, the global web scraping services market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.3% from 2020 to 2027, reaching $3.4 billion by 2027.
However, scraping data from popular sites like Amazon, Google, and Facebook is becoming increasingly difficult as they employ sophisticated anti-bot measures. A 2020 survey by Octoparse found that 42% of web scrapers have had their IPs blocked, and 23% have encountered CAPTCHAs.
To overcome these challenges, businesses are turning to advanced data scraping tools that leverage large proxy networks, headless browsers, and machine learning to extract data at scale. But with dozens of scraping tools on the market, how do you choose the right one?
In this article, we‘ll dive deep into the 7 best data scraping tools for 2021, evaluating each one on ease of use, power, scalability, data quality, and price. Whether you‘re a scraping novice or an experienced programmer, you‘ll learn which tool is the best fit for your specific data extraction needs.
Key Criteria for Evaluating Data Scraping Tools
Before we get to the tool reviews, let‘s establish some key criteria you should consider when evaluating a data scraping platform:
Ease of Use
How quickly can you set up the tool and start scraping? Does it require coding skills, or can you point and click to build scrapers? The best tools provide intuitive GUIs, pre-built templates, and clear documentation.
Power and Flexibility
Can the tool handle JavaScript rendering, login forms, pagination, and other complex page elements? How much control do you have over headers, user agents, and proxy settings? Look for tools with full code-level customization options.
Scalability
How well does the tool perform on large websites with millions of pages? Can it run multiple concurrent scraping threads? Avoid tools that get bogged down or crash on big scraping jobs.
Data Quality
How clean and structured is the scraped data? Some tools perform automatic parsing and handle pagination to output tidy CSVs or JSONs. Others return raw HTML that requires post-processing.
Pricing
Data scraping tools charge based on metrics like number of pages, compute time, or data volume. Look for transparent pricing that fits your expected usage and scales predictably as you grow.
With those criteria in mind, let‘s start our tool reviews with the overall best data scraping tool for most users: Bright Data.
1. Bright Data
Bright Data (formerly Luminati) is the largest proxy network for web scraping, with over 72 million IP addresses across every country in the world. This unmatched proxy pool allows you to scrape even the most protected sites without fear of IP bans or CAPTCHAs.
Bright Data recently launched the Data Collector, a fully-managed, no-code web scraping solution. Simply point and click to build a scraper, and Bright Data handles the rest – proxy rotation, CAPTCHAs, pagination, and output to your desired format. It‘s by far the easiest enterprise-grade scraping tool I‘ve used.
For advanced use cases, Bright Data supports all the major scraping libraries and frameworks, including Scrapy, Puppeteer, and BeautifulSoup. The Proxy Manager allows fine-grained control over proxy type (datacenter, residential, mobile), location, and rotation settings.
Bright Data also stands out for its robust infrastructure and customer support. Their proxy network achieves a 99.99% success rate and average speeds of 50 Mbps, powered by 20,000 servers worldwide. And if you ever have issues with your scrapers, their 24/7 support team can help troubleshoot.
Plans start at $500/month for 50GB of data, with custom enterprise pricing available. They also offer a generous 7-day free trial to test the platform.
Pros:
- Largest proxy pool with 72M+ IPs for maximum success rates
- Intuitive point-and-click Data Collector for no-code scraping
- Handles all complexities (JavaScript, logins, pagination, etc.)
- 99.99% proxy success rate and 24/7 customer support
Cons:
- Higher starting price than some competitors
- Proxy-only plans are priced per IP, which can add up
2. Crawlera
Crawlera by Scrapinghub is a smart crawler and scraper API that automatically handles proxies, CAPTCHAs, retries, and concurrency scaling. It‘s designed for developers who want to offload the infrastructure headaches of large-scale scraping.
Crawlera sits in front of your existing spiders and queues, intercepting requests and returning responses with a single API call. The magic is in Crawlera‘s smart routing logic, which distributes requests across a pool of over 50 million proxies based on site-specific success rates.
Notably, Crawlera offers a specialized Amazon Crawler that is preconfigured to scrape 500+ Amazon properties worldwide. It handles every Amazon anti-bot measure, including AmazonUI, dynamic pricing, and two-factor authentication.
Crawlera has a simple pay-as-you-go pricing model based on "compute units", which are a combination of data volume, number of requests, and processing time. The standard plan starts at $25 for 50K compute units, while Amazon Crawler is priced at $99 for 50K compute units. Custom enterprise plans are also available.
Pros:
- Smart proxy routing for 50M+ IPs worldwide
- Handles all the hard work – CAPTCHAs, retries, concurrency, etc.
- Specialized Amazon Crawler for 500+ stores
- Simple pay-as-you-go pricing with no monthly commitments
Cons:
- No visual point-and-click interface; must be integrated into code
- Compute unit pricing model can be harder to predict than straight data volume pricing
3. ScrapingBee
ScrapingBee is a web scraping API that handles headless browsers, proxies and CAPTCHAs. It lets you scrape any website with a single API call – no complex configurations or proxy management required.
The key differentiator of ScrapingBee is its usage of real headless browsers to render JavaScript-heavy websites. Many sites today use frameworks like React and Angular that require a full browser environment to scrape properly. ScrapingBee makes this easy by spinning up a headless Chrome instance on demand for each request.
ScrapingBee has a generous free plan that allows 1,000 free requests per month, making it a great option to test out web scraping. Paid plans start at $29/month for 100K requests, and scale based on monthly request volume.
Pros:
- Real headless Chrome browsers to render JavaScript-heavy sites
- Simple API with 1 endpoint for any website
- Generous free plan with 1,000 requests/month
- Pre-built integrations for Python, Node.js, and cURL
Cons:
- Pricing scales based on requests, which can add up for large crawls
- Not as customizable as running your own headless browsers
4. Apify
Apify is a web scraping and automation platform that lets you build and run scrapers in the cloud with no server maintenance. It offers both pre-built scrapers for popular sites and a full code editor to build your own.
Apify‘s strength is its focus on making web scraping accessible to non-developers. In addition to the code editor, it provides a visual interface to configure your crawler‘s starting URLs, click elements, fill in forms, and extract data. This opens up web scraping to marketers, analysts, and other less technical roles.
For developers, Apify supports code-based scraping with popular libraries like Puppeteer, Playwright, and its own apify/actor API in Node.js. Scrapers can be scheduled or triggered via API to run on Apify‘s scalable infrastructure.
Apify offers a free plan with 5,000 monthly compute units, and paid plans starting at $49/month for 25,000 compute units. Note that compute units are Apify‘s currency based on a combination of memory, CPU, and data traffic.
Pros:
- Visual low-code scraping for non-developers
- Managed cloud platform with no servers to maintain
- Library of pre-built scrapers for popular sites
- Flexible code editor supporting multiple languages and frameworks
Cons:
- Free plan is limited to 5,000 compute units (roughly 20 minutes of runtime)
- Compute unit pricing model can be harder to predict and budget for
5. Mozenda
Mozenda is a desktop-based scraping tool that enables non-technical users to scrape websites without writing code. Its point-and-click editor allows you to build "agents" that target specific page elements, navigate sites, process data, and export it to various formats.
Mozenda requires Windows to run its agent builder, but the actual scraping is done in the cloud on Mozenda‘s servers. This hybrid approach lets you build agents locally while offloading the processing to the cloud for better performance and scale.
One standout feature of Mozenda is its ability to scrape dynamic, JavaScript-heavy websites out of the box. It uses a full Chrome browser environment to render pages before scraping, and can handle animations, tab clicks, and other interactive elements.
Mozenda‘s pricing is based on the number of pages scraped per month, starting at $250/month for 10,000 pages. All plans include full access to the agent builder, cloud platform, and API.
Pros:
- No-code visual agent builder for non-developers
- Cloud-based scraping infrastructure for performance and scale
- Handles dynamic JavaScript sites with ease
- Intuitive scheduling and export options
Cons:
- Requires Windows to build agents locally
- Higher starting price than some cloud-only tools
- Limited customization options compared to code-based tools
6. ParseHub
ParseHub is a web-based scraping tool that lets you visually select page elements to extract without writing code. Its point-and-click interface supports infinite scrolling, dropdowns, JavaScript rendering, and other complex web interactions.
ParseHub runs scrapers in the cloud and provides an API to retrieve data in JSON format. You can also download data as CSV or Excel files, or send it directly to Google Sheets for further analysis.
Like Mozenda, ParseHub is well-suited for non-technical users who want to scrape data without learning a programming language. Its visual selector makes it easy to target specific page elements, and it can handle multi-page navigation and pagination.
ParseHub has a free plan that allows 5 public projects with up to 200 pages each. Paid plans start at $149/month for 20 private projects and higher page limits.
Pros:
- Intuitive point-and-click interface for building scrapers
- Handles JavaScript rendering, pagination, and complex interactions
- Cloud-based infrastructure for faster scraping and scaling
- Free plan for small scraping projects
Cons:
- Limited to web-based interface; no API access on free plan
- More expensive than some cloud-based scraping tools
- No pre-built templates or integrations with third-party services
7. Scrapy
Scrapy is an open-source Python framework for building web spiders and extracting structured data from websites. As a code-based tool, it offers complete flexibility and control over your scraping logic.
With Scrapy, you define your spider‘s behavior in Python, including the starting URLs, link patterns to follow, CSS or XPath selectors to extract data, and pipelines to process and store items. Scrapy takes care of task scheduling, concurrent requests, and retries under the hood.
Scrapy is highly extensible via plugins, middlewares, and API integrations. You can easily add functionality like proxy rotation, user agent spoofing, and JavaScript rendering to handle more complex scraping jobs.
As a free and open-source project, Scrapy has a large and active community with extensive documentation. You can find pre-built spiders, tutorials, and troubleshooting guides for almost any scraping use case.
The main limitation of Scrapy is that it requires Python programming skills and local infrastructure to run spiders. For large-scale scraping, you‘ll need to deploy Scrapy in the cloud or a distributed environment like Scrapyd or Scrapy Cloud.
Pros:
- Free and open-source with a large community
- Complete flexibility and control over scraping logic
- Extensible with plugins, middlewares, and API integrations
- Built-in support for concurrent requests and retries
Cons:
- Requires Python programming skills
- Must set up and maintain your own infrastructure
- Steeper learning curve than visual scraping tools
Conclusion
As the web scraping market continues to grow, we can expect to see even more advanced tools and platforms emerge to make data extraction easier, faster, and more accessible to non-technical users.
The 7 tools covered in this article represent the best of what‘s available in 2021, whether you‘re a developer looking for complete control and flexibility, or a marketer who wants to visually scrape websites without writing code.
If you‘re new to web scraping, I recommend starting with a visual tool like Bright Data‘s Data Collector or ParseHub to get a feel for the process. As you scale up, you can graduate to a code-based tool like Scrapy for maximum customization.
Whichever tool you choose, remember that successful web scraping is as much an art as it is a science. You‘ll need to constantly adapt your scrapers to handle new site layouts, anti-bot countermeasures, and data formats. But with the right tool and a bit of persistence, you can unlock valuable insights from the web to drive your business forward.
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