Web Scraping Service vs. Automatic Web Scraper: Which is the best option?

What is web scraping?

Web scraping aka. web extraction or web crawling refers to the process of obtaining various unstructured information from any website and turning it into structured, clean data such as xls, csv, or txt or populating the captured data to a database directly. Some common uses of web scraping include lead generation, data collection for academic research, price monitoring from competitors’ websites, product catalog scraping, and many more. For all kinds of good reasons, people turn to web scraping and can get pretty confused about which is the best path to go. In this article, I will try to walk through the Pros and cons of both web scraping services and automatic web scraper.  

What are some web scraping options?

When it comes to web scraping, there are two major kinds of providers available in the market, scraping tool providers and scraping service providers. Product provider basically refers to the many so-called web scrapers or web extractors, examples are import.io, Octoparse, Scrapy, and others. Some of these products are easier to handle for non-technical users such as Octoparse and Import.io. Some require more programming background such as Scrapy and Content Grabber. For those running on a service model, they are commonly known as DaaS, short for Data as Service. These companies do all the scraping work themselves and will provide the data to you in any format you like at any frequency; they will even provide weekly/monthly data feeds to you via API if needed. A few well-known ones are Scrapinghub, Datahen, Data Hero, etc. Among these there are also companies that provide scraping tools and provide scraping services at the same time, Mozenda scraping service and Octoparse Scraping Service. Just because they offer self-customizable scraper doesn’t mean their scraping service is any less proficient than those who only do scraping service. In fact, data services provided by crawler companies can be a lot more cost-efficient and are much more friendly to one-time scrapes because obviously, they have the edge in owning a customizable scraping tool and only minimum manual intervention will be required.

So what is the essential difference between using a DIY web scraper and seeking help from a web scraping company? While there are many the most critical ones are,

1. Cost
2. Willingness to learn
3. Deadline
4. The complexity of the scraping project

If you are a student looking to scrape some public data to support your thesis research with a tight budget, a scraping tool will be the best way to go; If you are an enterprise looking to outsource a brand monitoring project running on a tight schedule, data scraping service will provide you with what you need. While these are only two obvious examples of how people of different groups will find themselves at more advantages using one product/service over another, they should give you a general feeling of how to approach this question by going through your specific demands, budget, schedule, project complexity and etc.

Comparing web scraping alternatives

Are you ready to scrape?

Just like everything else, there are Pros and cons with either a web scraping service or a data scraping tool. Whichever is the better option will largely depend on the specific schema, data application, and project budget. Do go through your request thoroughly, and carry out the necessary research on the products/services available in the market – all these will be essential to finding the best web scraping solution tailored to your scraping needs.

That’s all I have for now. Feel free to drop a message if you have any specific questions about any web scraper or service. Cheers!