Web scraping – A domain that is resonating across industries and businesses recently. Web scraping is one of the big businesses in the years to come.

What is Web Scraping used for?

Web scraping is used to scrape/gathering data across websites. When we talk about extracting/gathering data from the websites, we are not talking about data of a smaller size.

Why extract data from multiple websites?

• Industries and businesses across the globe are spending millions and more on extracting data from websites.
• In the current competitive environment and super-charged business era, web scraping helps industries and businesses to understand and analyze their market intelligence, make better investment decisions, and build better products for their customers.

• The world is witnessing significant advancements in the web scraping domain in the past few years. Open Source – the term that has helped technology rise big-time – web scraping is no alien to open-source frameworks.
• To put it in a simple term, to gather data from the Internet, open-source web scraping tools play a large part.
• It is always difficult to pick one open-source tool/framework for web scraping from available hundreds of tools, API, and frameworks available online.
• In this article, let us look at the top 5 – popular – open-source web scraping tools, frameworks, and managed services currently available.
• According to our expert team, these tools are great for crawling, scraping the web, and parsing out the data.

According to marketwatch – Global Web Scraper Software Market is expected to project a notable CAGR of 3.75% in 2030

Global Web Scraper Software Market to surpass USD 196.88 million by 2030 from USD 149.09 million in 2018 at a CAGR of 3.75% throughout the forecast period, i.e., 2019-30

Scrapy

1. Scrapy is a free and open-source web-crawling framework written in Python. Originally designed for web scraping, it can also be used to extract data using APIs or as a general-purpose web crawler.
2. Its project architecture is built around “spiders”, which are self-contained crawlers that are given a set of instructions.
3. It also provides a web-crawling shell, which can be used by developers to test their assumptions on a site’s behaviour.

Puppeteer

1. Puppeteer is a Node library that provides a powerful but simple API that allows you to control Google’s headless Chrome browser.
2. The best case to use Puppeteer for web scraping is if the information you want is generated using a combination of API data and JavaScript code.
3. With its full-featured API, it covers most use cases. It is one of the options for scraping JavaScript websites on Chrome.

Saivi

1. Saivi is our comprehensive offering that covers end-to-end data-related services and our expert consultants can help all the way from sourcing to visualization!
2. A Data journey comprises of four stages: Scraping or Aggregating Data, Annotation or Data Labelling, Leveraging Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence, and Data Visualization.
3. Saivi offers custom solutions in each of these phases that will accelerate your digital journey and realize the power of new oil (Data).

Selenium

1. Selenium WebDriver uses a real web browser to access the website, so it would like its activity would not look any different from a real person accessing information in the same way.
2. Although it is mostly used for testing, WebDriver can be used for scraping dynamic web pages.
3. Using WebDriver makes web scraping easier, but the scraping process is much slower as compared to simple HTTP requests to the web browser.

Jaunt

1. Jaunt is a Java library for web-scraping and JSON querying.
2. It enables your Java programs to work with forms and tables, control/process individual HTTP Requests/Responses and provides customizable.
3. It provides both free and paid versions. The free version is under Apache license, it can be used for personal or commercial projects, including redistributing the file.