Top 11 Free Web Scraping Frameworks

The past few years have seen great advances in the field of web scraping.

Web scraping is used as a means to collect and analyze data across the web. To support this process, a number of frameworks have emerged that meet the different requirements of different use cases.

Let’s take a look at some popular web scraping frameworks.

The following is a self-hosted solution, so you will need to install and configure it yourself. Check out this post for cloud-based scraping solutions.

scrapie

Scrapy is a collaboration framework based on Python. Provides a complete library suite. Fully asynchronous to accept requests and process them faster.

Advantages of Scrapy include:

• Super fast performance
• Optimal memory usage
• Much like the Django framework
• Efficient comparison algorithm
• Easy-to-use features with extensive selector support
• Easily customizable framework by adding custom middleware or pipelines for custom functionality
• portable
• Provides a cloud environment for performing resource-intensive operations

If you want to get serious about learning Scrapy, I recommend this course.

mechanical soup

MechanicalSoup can simulate human behavior on web pages. It is based on BeautifulSoup, the most efficient web analytics library for simple sites.

advantage

• Neat library with very little code overhead
• Very fast when it comes to parsing simple pages
• Ability to simulate human behavior
• CSS and XPath selector support

MechanicalSoup is useful when you’re trying to simulate human actions, such as waiting for a specific event or clicking on a specific item to open a popup, rather than simply scraping data.

Jaunt

Jaunt features such as automated scraping, JSON-based data queries, and a headless ultralight browser. Supports tracking of all executed HTTP requests/responses.

The big benefits of using Jaunt are:

• An organized framework for all your web scraping needs
• Allows JSON-based queries of data from web pages
• Supports form and table scraping
• Allows control of HTTP requests and responses
• Easy interface with REST API
• Supports HTTP/HTTPS proxies
• Supports search chains, regex-based searches, and basic authentication in HTML DOM navigation

One thing to note in the case of Jaunt is that its browser API does not support Javascript-based websites. This is solved using Jauntium, described next.

Gentium

Jauntium is an enhanced version of the Jaunt framework. It not only solves the shortcomings of Jaunt but also adds more features.

• Ability to create web bots that scrape pages and execute events as needed
• Easily search and manipulate the DOM
• Ability to create test cases using web scraping functionality
• Support for integration with Selenium to simplify front-end testing
• Supports Javascript based websites which is advantageous compared to Jaunt framework

Good to use when you need to automate some processes and test them in different browsers.

storm crawler

Storm Crawler is a full-fledged Java-based web crawler framework. It is used to build scalable and optimized web crawling solutions in Java. Storm Crawler is primarily suited for providing an input stream through which URLs are sent through the stream for crawling.

advantage

• Highly scalable and can be used for large-scale recursive calls
• resilient in nature
• Better thread management to reduce crawl latency
• Easy to extend your library by adding more
• The web crawling algorithms provided are relatively efficient

noconex

Norconex HTTP Collector allows you to build enterprise-grade crawlers. It is available as a compiled binary that can run on many platforms.

advantage

• An average server can crawl up to millions of pages
• Ability to crawl documents in PDF, Word, and HTML formats
• Extract and process data directly from documents
• Supports OCR to extract text data from images
• Ability to detect language of content
• Crawl speed can be set
• You can set it to repeat across pages to continually compare and update data.

Norconex can be integrated to work on the bash command line as well as Java.

Apify

Apify SDK is a JS-based crawling framework, much like Scrapy mentioned above. This is one of the best web crawling libraries built in JavaScript. Although it may not be as powerful as Python-based frameworks, it is relatively lightweight and easier to code.

advantage

• Built-in support JS plugins such as Cheerio, Puppeteer, etc.
• Features an AutoScaled pool that allows you to start crawling multiple web pages simultaneously
• Quickly crawl internal links and extract data as needed
• A simpler library for coding crawlers
• Can throw data not only in HTML but also in JSON, CSV, XML, and Excel formats
• Runs in headless Chrome, so supports any type of website

Kimurai

Kimrei is written in Ruby and is based on the popular Ruby gems Capybara and Nikogiri , making it easier for developers to understand how to use the framework. It supports easy integration with headless Chrome browsers, Phantom JS, and simple HTTP requests.

advantage

• A single process can run multiple spiders
• Supports all events with Capybara gem support
• Automatically restarts the browser when JavaScript execution reaches a limit.
• Automatic handling of request errors
• It takes advantage of multiple cores of a processor and provides an easy way to perform parallel processing.

collie

Colly is a smooth, fast, elegant and easy-to-use framework even for beginners in the web scraping domain. With Colly, you can create any kind of crawler, spider, or scraper you want. This is especially important if the data you want to scrape is structured.

advantage

• Capable of processing over 1000 requests per second
• Supports automatic session handling and cookies
• Supports synchronous, asynchronous, and parallel scraping
• Caching support to speed up web scraping for repeated runs
• Understand robots.txt and prevent unwanted page scraping
• Out-of-the-box Google App Engine support

Colly is suitable for the requirements of data analysis and mining applications.

grab love

Grablab is highly extensible by nature. You can use it to build anything from a simple web scraping script with a few lines to a complex asynchronous processing script that scrapes a million pages.

advantage

• High scalability
• Supports parallel and asynchronous processing to scrape 1 million pages simultaneously
• Easy to get started, yet powerful enough to create complex tasks
• API scraping support
• Help build a Spider for any request

Grablib has built-in support for handling responses from requests. Therefore, scraping via web services is also possible.

beautiful soup

BeautifulSoup is a Python-based web scraping library. It is primarily used for HTML and XML web scraping. BeautifulSoup is typically leveraged on top of other frameworks that require better search and indexing algorithms. For example, the Scrapy framework described above uses BeautifulSoup as one of its dependencies.

Benefits of BeautifulSoup include:

• Supports parsing of broken XML and HTML
• Most efficient parsers available for this purpose
• Easy integration with other frameworks
• Light weight due to small footprint
• Comes with pre-built filtering and search functionality

If you’re interested in learning BeautifulSoap, check out this online course .

conclusion

As you may have noticed, these are all based on Python or Nodejs, so developers must be familiar with the Underline programming language. All of these are open source or free, so try them out and see what works for your business.