Is Web Scraping Legal? Explanation and Examples | ParseHub
With you being able to extract data from any website, is web scraping legal? Many big companies and data scientists will use web scrapers to extract data needed to help them make decisions. It allows them to gather the right data for investment opportunities, product development and market research. But first, let’s quickly discuss what is web scraping then will go into more detail if web scraping is legal. What is web scraping? Web scraping refers to the extraction of data from a website. This information is collected and then exported into a format that is more useful for the user. Be it a spreadsheet or an though web scraping can be done manually, in most cases, automated tools are preferred when scraping web data as they can be less costly and work at a faster web scraping legal? In short, the action of web scraping isn’t illegal. However there are some rules that need to be followed. Web scraping becomes illegal when non publicly available data becomes extracted. This question is asked a lot. In fact, according to Google Trends, searches for the term “web scraping legal” have been on a steady rise over the past 4 Google TrendsThis comes as no surprise given the growth of web scraping and many recent legal cases that related to web are ParseHub, and we will go over a few notorious legal cases and the insight of a tech lawyer to breakdown the topic and answer the question regarding the legality of web web scraping legal videoWeb Scraping Publicly Available DataFirst, we have to make a clear distinction about the type of data we are talking about when discussing the legality of web is data that can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection. For example, a public LinkedIn profile or a Craigslist to know if data on the internet is considered publicly available:The user who posted said data has decided to make it public. A user does not need to create an account or login to access the website’s does not block web scrapers or the other hand, there are cases of collecting and scraping private data which exist in a completely different realm of legality. Most notably, there is the case of Cambridge Analytica and their collection of private data from Facebook this context, we will be referring exclusively to publicly available table Web Scraping Legal CasesLegal cases are some of the best resources when looking at the legality of any activity. We will review 3 recent and notable legal cases surrounding web scraping:LinkedIn vs HiQ LabsComputer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)Craiglist vs Padmapper and othersLinkedIn vs hiQ LabshiQ Labs is a data analytics firm that focuses on workforce data and people analytics. Their analysis provides insights for their clients about specific of the ways that hiQ Labs collected data to fuel their insights was by scraping data from public LinkedIn a response, LinkedIn blocked hiQ Labs tools’ from accessing this publicly available data and served them with a cease and desist letter. Their argument was that hiQ Labs’ activities were in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) went on to fight this by filling a suit and obtaining a preliminary injunction in 2017. The district court found that hiQ was “likely to succeed” on its claims that accessing publicly available data was not a violation of the mputer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)The thing about the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is that it criminalizes access of protected computers and servers without authorization or beyond their authorized erefore, there is a disconnect between the CFAA and the automated access of publicly available a result, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld hiQ’s injunction on September of this is not a Supreme Court ruling or the creation of a specific law that protects web scraping, it definitely paves the way for a potential future aigslist vs Padmapper and othersIn a similar case from 2017, Craigslist filed a suit against a number of startups (including Padmapper) which scraped Craigslist data to support their defendants were worried after the trial court did not toss the case. As a result, this case was settled out of like these will now probably be less likely due to the hiQ Labs vs LinkedIn TakeJason Tashea, a writer for ABA Journal, has published his take on the legality of web scraping as it relates to the hiQ Labs his piece, Jason calls for the US Congress or the US Supreme Court to make a decision for the legality of web scraping. He claims this is needed in order to achieve an “open and healthy internet” TakeWhile we are definitely not lawyers, we have a similar take to Jason’ a website or user makes the decision to make their data public, then scraping it should be believe that in 20 years, people will be surprised to learn that web scraping existed in a legal grey area during our Web Scraping Ethical? We consider the scraping of publicly available data to be all, this data is already being made available for free. There is nothing stopping you from manually writing down Amazon product prices into a spreadsheet. Web scraping just automates this the same time, we also stand against the abuse of web scraping tools. For example, we do not condone the use of web scrapers to scrape emails for mass spamming. In fact, there are more ethical ways to use web scraping for email the end of the day, if the data you’re scraping is publicly available and you’re not seeking to abuse web scraping tools, we’d consider it fact, web scrapers are a major solution when it comes to websites and services that do not provide an ’s Next? The legality of web scraping is still relatively up in the air. But that doesn’t mean web scraping is illegal, ever, the hiQ vs LinkedIn case might be the resolution this issue needs if there’s a verdict set by the US Supreme Court at some post was written on October 7, 2019 and last updated on July 14, 2021
12 Best Web Scraping Tools in 2021 to Extract Online Data – Popupsmart
Web scraping tools are software developed specifically to simplify the process of data extraction from websites. Data extraction is quite a useful and commonly used process however, it also can easily turn into a complicated, messy business and require a heavy amount of time and effort.
So, what does a web scraper do?
A web scraper uses bots to extract structured data and content from a website by extracting the underlying HTML code and data stored in a database.
In data extraction, from preventing your IP from getting banned to parsing the source website correctly, generating data in a compatible format, and to data cleaning, there is a lot of sub-process that goes in. Luckily, web scrapers and data scraping tools make this process easy, fast, and reliable.
Often, the information online to be extracted is too large to be manually extracted. That is why companies who use web scraping tools may collect more data in a shorter amount of time at a lower cost.
Besides, companies benefitting from data scraping get a step ahead in the competition between the rivals in the long run.
In this post, you will find a list of the top 12 best web scraping tools compared based on their features, pricing, and ease-of-use.
12 Best Web Scraping Tools
Here’s a list of the best web scraping tools:
Luminati (BrightData)
Scrapingdog
AvesAPI
ParseHub
Diffbot
Octoparse
ScrapingBee
Grepsr
Scraper API
Scrapy
Web Scraping Tools
Pricing for 1, 000, 000 API Calls
IP Rotation
JS Rendering
Geolocating
$99/m
✔
$90/m
$800/m
✘
$499/m
$899/m
$75/m
Luminati
Pay-As-You-Go
$999/m
Free
On application
Web scraper tools search for new data manually or automatically. They fetch the updated or new data, and then, store them for you to easily access. These tools are useful for anyone trying to collect data from the internet.
For example, web scraping tools can be used to collect real estate data, hotel data from top travel portals, product, pricing, and review data for e-commerce websites, and more. So, basically, if you are asking yourself ‘where can I scrape data, ’ it is data scraping tools.
Now, let’s take a look at the list of the best web scraper tools in comparison to answer the question; what is the best web scraping tool?
is an easy-to-use web scraper tool, providing a scalable, fast, proxy web scraper API in an endpoint. Based on cost-effectiveness and features, is on top of the list. As you will see in the continuation of this post, is one of the lowest cost web scraping tools out there.
-Unlike its competitors, does not charge extra for Google and other hard-to-scrape websites.
-It offers the best price/performance ratio in the market for Google scraping (SERP). (5, 000, 000 SERP for $249)
-Additionally, has 2-3 seconds average speed in collecting anonymous data from Instagram and a 99% success rate.
-Its gateway speed is also 4 times faster than its competitors.
-Moreover, this tool is providing residential and mobile proxy access twice as cheaper.
Here are some of its other features.
Features
Rotating proxies; allow you to scrape any website. rotates every request made to the API using its proxy pool.
Unlimited bandwidth in all plans
Fully customizable
Only charges for successful requests
Geotargeting option for over 10 countries
JavaScript render which allows scraping web pages that require to render JavaScript
Super proxy parameter: allows you to scrape data from websites with protections against data center IPs.
Pricing: Price plans start at $29/m. Pro plan is $99/m for 1, 300, 000 API calls.
Scrapingdog is a web scraping tool that makes it easier to handle proxies, browsers, as well as CAPTCHAs. This tool provides HTML data of any webpage in a single API call. One of the best features of Scraping dog is that it also has a LinkedIn API available. Here are other prominent features of Scrapingdog:
Rotates IP address with each request and bypasses every CAPTCHA for scraping without getting blocked.
Rendering JavaScript
Webhooks
Headless Chrome
Who is it for? Scrapingdog is for anyone who needs web scraping, from developers to non-developers.
Pricing: Price plans start at $20/m. JS rendering feature is available for at least the standard plan which is $90/m. LinkedIn API available only for the pro plan ($200/m. )
AvesAPI is a SERP (search engine results page) API tool that allows developers and agencies to scrape structured data from Google Search.
Unlike other services in our list, AvesAPI has a sharp focus on the data you’ll be extracting, rather than a broader web scraping. Therefore, it’s best for SEO tools and agencies, as well as marketing professionals.
This web scraper offers a smart distributed system that is capable of extracting millions of keywords with ease. That means leaving behind the time-consuming workload of checking SERP results manually and avoiding CAPTCHA.
Features:
Get structured data in JSON or HTML in real-time
Acquire top-100 results from any location and language
Geo-specific search for local results
Parse product data on shopping
Downside: Since this tool was founded quite recently, it’s hard to tell how real users feel about the product. However, what the product is promising is still excellent to give it a free try and see for yourself.
Pricing: AvesAPI’s prices are quite affordable compared to other web scraping tools. Plus, you can try the service for free.
Paid plans start at $50 per month for 25K searches.
ParseHub is a free web scraper tool developed for extracting online data. This tool comes as a downloadable desktop app. It provides more features than most of the other scrapers, for example, you can scrape and download images/files, download CSV and JSON files. Here’s a list of more of its features.
IP rotation
Cloud-based for automatically storing data
Scheduled collection (to collect data monthly, weekly, etc. )
Regular expressions to clean text and HTML before downloading data
API & webhooks for integrations
REST API
JSON and Excel format for downloads
Get data from tables and maps
Infinitely scrolling pages
Get data behind a log-in
Pricing: Yes, ParseHub offers a variety of features, but most of them are not included in its free plan. The free plan covers 200 pages of data in 40 minutes and 5 public projects.
Priced plans start at $149/m. So, I can suggest that more features come at a higher cost. If your business is small, it may be best to use the free version or one of the cheaper web scrapers on our list.
Diffbot is another web scraping tool that provides extracted data from web pages. This data scraper is one of the top content extractors out there. It allows you to identify pages automatically with the Analyze API feature and extract products, articles, discussions, videos, or images.
Product API
Clean text and HTML
Structured search to see only the matching results
Visual processing that enables scraping most non-English web pages
JSON or CSV format
The article, product, discussion, video, image extraction APIs
Custom crawling controls
Fully-hosted SaaS
Pricing: 14-day free trial. Price plans start at $299/m, which is quite expensive and a drawback for the tool. However, it’s up to you to decide whether you need the extra features this tool provides and to evaluate its cost-effectiveness for your business.
Octoparse stands out as an easy-to-use, no-code web scraping tool. It provides cloud services to store extracted data and IP rotation to prevent IPs from getting blocked. You can schedule scraping at any specific time. Besides, it offers an infinite scrolling feature. Download results can be in CSV, Excel, or API formats.
Who is it for? Octoparse is best for non-developers who are looking for a friendly interface to manage data extraction processes.
Capterra Rating: 4. 6/5
Pricing: Free plan available with limited features. Price plans start at $75/m.
ScrapingBee is another popular data extraction tool. It renders your web page as if it was a real browser, enabling the management of thousands of headless instances using the latest Chrome version.
So, they claim dealing with headless browsers as other web scrapers do is time-wasting and eating up your RAM & CPU. What else does ScrapingBee offer?
JavaScript rendering
Rotating proxies
General web scraping tasks like real estate scraping, price-monitoring, extracting reviews without getting blocked.
Scraping search engine results pages
Growth hacking (lead generation, extracting contact information, or social media. )
Pricing: ScrapingBee’s price plans start at $29/m.
BrightData is an open-source web scraper for data extraction. It is a data collector providing an automated and customized flow of data.
Data unblocker
No-code, open-source proxy management
Search engine crawler
Proxy API
Browser extension
Capterra Rating: 4. 9/5
Pricing: Pricing varies based on the selected solutions: Proxy Infrastructure, Data Unblocker, Data Collector, and sub-features. Check the website for detailed info.
Start to Scrape with BrightData
Developed to produce data scraping solutions, Grepsr can help your lead generation programs, as well as competitive data collection, news aggregation, and financial data collection. Web scraping for lead generation or lead scraping enables you to extract email addresses.
Did you know that using popups is also a super easy and effective way to generate leads? With Popupsmart popup builder, you can create attractive subscription popups, set up advanced targeting rules, and simply collect leads from your website.
Plus, there is a free version.
Build your first popup in 5 minutes.
Now for Grepsr, let’s take a look at the tool’s outstanding features.
Lead generation data
Pricing & competitive data
Financial & market data
Distribution chain monitoring
Any custom data requirements
API ready
Social media data and more
Pricing: Price plans start at $199/Source. It is a bit expensive so this could be a drawback. Still, it is up to your business needs.
Scraper API is a proxy API for web scraping. This tool helps you manage proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs, so you can get the HTML from any web page by making an API call.
Fully customizable (request headers, request type, IP geolocation, headless browser)
Unlimited bandwidth with speeds up to 100Mb/s
40+ million IPs
12+ geolocations
Pricing: Paid plans start at $29/m however, the lowest-cost plan does not include geotargeting and JS rendering, and it is limited.
The startup plan ($99/m) includes only the US geolocating and no JS rendering. To benefit from all geolocating and JS rendering, you need to purchase the $249/m business plan.
Another one in our list of the best web scraping tools is Scrapy. Scrapy is an open-source and collaborative framework designed to extract data from websites. It is a web scraping library for Python developers who want to build scalable web crawlers.
This tool is completely free.
Web scraping tool helps to collect data at a scale. It offers operational management of all your web data while providing accuracy, completeness, and reliability.
offers a builder to form your own datasets by importing the data from a specific web page and then exporting the extracted data to CSV. Also, it allows building 1000+ APIs based on your requirements.
comes as a web tool along with free apps for Mac OS X, Linus, and Windows.
While provides useful features, this web scraping tool has some drawbacks as well, which I should mention.
Capterra rating: 3. 6/5. The reason for such a low rating is its cons. Most users complain about the lack of support and too expensive costs.
Pricing: Price on application through scheduling a consultation.
I tried to list the best web scraping tools that will ease your online data extraction workload. I hope you find this post helpful when deciding on a data scraper. Do you have any other web scraper tools that you use and suggest? I’d love to hear. You can write in the comments.
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Thank you for your time.
ParseHub Pricing, Alternatives & More 2021 – Capterra
ParseHub ReviewsShowing 5 of 13 reviewsFounderMarketing and Advertising, 1-10 employeesUsed the software for: Less than 6 months“ParseHub will give you for free what many “Lead Scraping” Services charge you $1000+ for. ”Overall: I wanted to get leads for my real estate marketing company, so I explored some lead-scraping options. Some were too “cookie-cutter” and weren’t giving me what I was looking for and had limited functionality. Some were too expensive right out the bat. Some charged you on a “per-lead” basis. Some didn’t tell you where they were getting the leads from and just gave you a list of supposedly “good leads. ”
Using parsehub, I was able to extract any information from any website I wanted, create custom excel files with the person’s name, email, phone number, brokerage, office, city, province, and more… all I had to do was learn how to use it. That definitely wasn’t easy. It was a bit stressful to learn at first. But once I really sat down and dedicated two hours to learning how to use it, I was able to create a successful scraper that got me over 10, 000 leads. Not bad for 2 hours of focused work and then a couple of hours of scraping/uploading time that I had to wait on and monitor.
Pros: I could scrape an almost unlimited number of leads for free. Cons: It was difficult to learn and implement. Making a scraper for a given site is a 1-3 hour experience when you’re new to it. Reasons for Switching to ParseHub: Like I said above, I made the switch to ParseHub because it was the perfect mix of options. Free, unlimited number of leads, totally customizable, and guaranteed accurate (because you’re scraping the site yourself, in its most current version. ) Vendor ResponseBy ParseHub on June 9, 2021Hi there, thanks for the feedback. We continue to make improvements in ease of use, but this is a hard problem when you want to cover as many use cases as ParseHub does. Websites come in all different shapes and sizes, and we want to be able to extract data from all of them. This unfortunately comes with some necessary complexity. We’re glad you were able to figure out how to use it.
Our customer success team is always available to help you with your projects if you ever get lication AnalystInformation Services, 11-50 employeesUsed the software for: 6-12 months“User Personnel Experience In Professional Level”Overall: We are work on extraction data from website into local database based on customer not need basic programming knowledge to start
friendly user-interface (except template tab bar)
good test-mode (except 5 pages limit fast-forward)
very high quality user support
have javascript/regex integration
Cons: do not have been comment/remark command
cannot import/export template
new tab bar does not for more 10 template
condition detail display full at top of screen
test-run only allow fast-play for 5 pages
have limited javascript/regex integration only
some parsehub not response if website too heavy or copy/pause command from template of other phj file
unable to pause & download json in run BI DeveloperLeisure, Travel & Tourism, 201-500 employeesUsed the software for: 2+ years“Point and click webpage data extraction ”Overall: We are able to rapidly configure website to data extraction as Relatively easy to extract data from websites using a point & click interface. Much more can be done through further project configuration and accessing formulas etc. Cons: It can be difficult to understand why extraction fails or how the project needs to be changed to make it work. UnspecifiedUsed the software for: Less than 6 months“Not for intermediate to complex level scraping”Overall: None, see my reviewPros: Of no use for intermediate to complex level scraping
I tried with medium to large sized data sets, site I have scraped before with open source tools (BS4, Requests etc). parsehub couldnt handle be useful for non programmers wanting incredibly basic scrapesCons: Unable to parse a intermediate complexity JSON, XML etc
Can not compete with BS4, Requests etc in Python
Sites I have scraped, couldn’t be scraped by source does a much better jobDirector of Web DevelopmentInternet, 51-200 employeesUsed the software for: 6-12 months“The Web Scraper that you will need”Overall: The idea that you can upload files directly to S3 help us a lot with a manual task that were we needed to download 30 to 50 files a day and uploaded to our platform and now this is done automatically. In other words HEAVEN Pros: – Cross Platform, for Windows, Mac and Linux
– Have a great un boarding, that help you understand the workflow and the concepts inside the tools
– Amazon S3 and Dropbox integration for files download inside the pages, in fact this feature was a deal winner
– Scheduling and Recurrent scraps!!
– An API that help you do what ever you want (almost)Cons: – Sometimes is not the most user friendly tool, this kind of tools never are in my honest opinion.
– Some of the steps are redundant and you will have to re do it over and over.
Frequently Asked Questions about parsehub reviews
Is ParseHub legit?
If you are not a programmer, ParseHub is one of the cheapest and best options to be able to scrape massive amounts of data with little effort. Their customer service is top tier. If you run into issues, they will help you. There documentation is also quite good.
Is ParseHub legal?
In short, the action of web scraping isn’t illegal. … We are ParseHub, and we will go over a few notorious legal cases and the insight of a tech lawyer to breakdown the topic and answer the question regarding the legality of web scraping.Oct 7, 2019
How do I use ParseHub?
EXAMPLE: Create your first ParseHub projectDownload the ParseHub Desktop App. … Open Website & Start New Project. … Step 3: Select & Extract All of the Post Titles. … Step 4: Select & Extract All Product Prices. … Run the Project. … Download Data (CSV & JSON) … Connect to API [Advanced/Optional] … What’s next?Sep 14, 2018