Octoparase User Review
By Que Young from USA – Basic Plan User
I first discovered Octoparse through this software search engine site which goes by the name, Capterra. I spent endless hours looking through Google to find the right scraper or crawler tool, when I came across a few different options through Capterra. I’m always usually caught between being either joyfully curious or cautiously skeptical, so I didn’t jump to trying any particular right away. Because just about everything has to be researched and tested to the fire. So I decided to go with what I would call, the least riskiest option in my view, Octoparse.
Although I never heard of them before which isn’t a bad thing, the little blue octopus head stood out from the rest, and well that’s the thing, a lot of the others did not sound like the kind of software that they were advertising that I was looking for.
And may I remind you I spent what felt like an eternity weeding through a long list of good and bad candidates, some of which are old well known guru’s who’ve been around the a block a few times like that of software WinAutomation. Now, understand everyone has a specific niche that they look for.
I come across a lot of stuff out there that’s only offering SAAS. Octoparse does offer that but it also has a great free option too that lets you have hands on experience. Now I’ll admit that at first, Octoparse and I was not getting along with tutorial wise for what I was trying to accomplish. I want to scrape for many various types of information, the usual product data, news articles, etc.
However, I really got used to Octoparse’s bulk list of URLs later. That saves a tremendous amount of time which having to extract large amounts of data. There are still a lot of other tutorials I would like to head back to and smooth over to really utilize Octoparse more fully. And also if you are a beginner like me, the step by step tutorial will blow you away. It not only adopts from the traditional sense of tutorial videos or page by page scroll via a table of content. Octoparse literally shows you where to click on button by button within the software. Now to me, that is what I call robust visual learning.
And just so you know, I was an import.io person for two years until I started running into a lot of compatibility issues using it with other websites. So if you are looking for something that is new on the scene with other great features to offer then give Octoparse a shot!
