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Originally published as https://reurl.cc/y64lOM
What Is A Web Scraper
A web scraper (also known as a web crawler) is a tool or a piece of code that performs the process to extract data from web pages on the Internet. Various web scrapers have played an important role in the boom of big data and make it easy for people to scrape the data they need.
If you’re interested in the concepts of web scraping, you can read about the 10 myths about web scraping to find more information about its legacy, usage, cases, challenges, etc.
In this article, you can learn the best easy-to-use web scrapers and the top 10 open-source web scrapers.
Alternative | No-Coding Web Crawler
Among various web scrapers, open-source web scrapers allow users to code based on their source code or framework, and fuel a massive part to help scrape in a fast, simple but extensive way.
On the other hand, open-source web crawlers are quite powerful and extensible, but are limited to developers. There are lots of non-coding tools like Octoparse, making scraping no longer only a privilege for developers. If you are not proficient with programming, these tools will be more suitable and make scraping easy for you. It provides auto-detect mode so that you can finish the whole scraping process within several clicks. You can also create a workflow to customize the crawler.