- It is extremely easy to use, scalable and incredibly powerful. It has all the features you find in the best tools, plus many more. It really is the next evolution in web scraping technology. It is the only web scraping software scraping.pro gives 5 out of 5 stars on the Web Scraper Test Drive evaluations.
- Import.io is a web scraping tool that helps the user to form datasets by importing data from any web page and exporting data to CSV. This tool integrates data into an application using APIs and webhooks. It has easy interaction with web forms and logins.
It is a desktop tool which has access for platforms like Mac, Windows, Saas, Cloud, Web, etc., Parse Hub is a scraper tool helps in scraping websites. It was founded in the year 2013 and is located in Canada. This tool has both Free trial pack and paid pack as well. It can scrape any interactive website. Top 25 Web Data Mining and Web Scraping tools, Fast and Reliable Web Scrapers, Millions of Digital Marketing Agencies and Freelancers using these tools. What is Web Scraping Tool. Web scraping tools are also known as Web harvesting tools or Web data extraction tools. Web Scrappers use intelligent automation to extract useful information from the websites. These tools help you to collect huge data from the websites on a large scale seamlessly.
Javascript is a widely-used programming language and an ever-increasing number of websites use JavaScript to fetch and render user content. While there are various tools available for web scraping, a growing number of people are exploring Javascript web scraping tools.
To carry out your web scraping projects, you need to familiarize yourself with web scraping tools to choose the right one. We will walk through open source Javascript tools and frameworks that are great for web crawling, web scraping, parsing, and extracting data.
Open Source Javascript Web Scraping Tools and Frameworks
Features/Tools | Github Stars | Github Forks | Github Open Issues | Last Updated | Documentation | License |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Apify SDK | 22K | 1.4K | 216 | June 2020 | Excellent | MIT |
NodeCrawler | 5.4K | 828 | 23 | Nov 2015 | Good | MIT |
Puppeteer | 62K | 6.4K | 1,039 | June 2020 | Excellent | Apache License 2.0 |
Playwright | 13.3K | 402 | 115 | May 2020 | Good | Apache License 2.0 |
Node SimpleCrawler | 2K | 344 | 51 | April 2020 | Good | BSD 2-Clause |
PJScrape | 1K | 175 | 28 | Oct 2011 | Poor | MIT |
Cheerio | 22K | 1.4K | 216 | April 2020 | Good | MIT |
Note: All details in the table above are current at the time of writing this article.
Apify SDK
Apify SDK is a Node.js library which is a lot like Scrapy positioning itself as a universal web scraping library in JavaScript, with support for Puppeteer, Cheerio, and more. With its unique features like RequestQueue and AutoscaledPool, you can start with several URLs and then recursively follow links to other pages and can run the scraping tasks at the maximum capacity of the system respectively.
Requirements – The Apify SDK requires Node.js 10.17 or later
Available Selectors – CSS
Available Data Formats – JSON, JSONL, CSV, XML, Excel or HTML
Pros
- Supports any type of website
- Best library for web crawling in Javascript we have tried so far.
- Built-in support for Puppeteer and Cheerio
Installation
Add Apify SDK to any Node.js project by running:
Best Use Case
Apify SDK is a preferred tool when other solutions fall flat during heavier tasks – performing deep crawls, rotating proxies to mask the browser, scheduling the scraper to run multiple times, caching results to prevent data prevention if the code happens to crash, and more. Foxin drivers. Apify handles such operations with ease but it can also help to develop web scrapers of your own in Javascript.
Node SimpleCrawler
Simplecrawler is designed to provide a basic, flexible, and robust API for crawling websites. It was written to archive, analyze, and search some very large websites and can get through hundreds of thousands of pages and write large volumes of data without issue. It has a lot of useful events that can help you track the progress of your crawling process. This crawler is extremely configurable and there’s a long list of settings you can change to adapt it to your specific needs.
Requirements – Node.js 8.0+
Pros
- Respects robot.txt rules
- Highly configurable
- Easy setup and installation
Cons
- Does not download the response body when it encounters an HTTP error status in the response
- No promise support
- May get invalid URLs because of its brute force approach
Installation
To install simplecrawler type the command:
Best Use Case Business communication by shirley taylor pdf.
If you need to start off with a flexible and configurable base for writing your own crawler
NodeCrawler
Nodecrawler is a popular web crawler for NodeJS, making it a very fast crawling solution. If you prefer coding in JavaScript, or you are dealing with mostly a Javascript project, Nodecrawler will be the most suitable web crawler to use. Its installation is pretty simple too. JSDOM and Cheerio (used for HTML parsing) use it for server-side rendering, with JSDOM being more robust.
Requires Version – Node v4.0.0 or greater
Available Selectors – CSS, XPath
Available Data Formats – CSV, JSON, XML
Pros
- Easy installation
Cons
- It has no Promise support
Installation
To install this package with npm:
Best Use Case
If you need a lightweight web crawler that combines efficiency and convenience.
PJScrape
PJscrape is a web scraping framework written in Python using Javascript and JQuery. It is built to run with PhantomJS, so it allows you to scrape pages in a fully rendered, Javascript-enabled context from the command line, with no browser required. The scraper functions are evaluated in a full browser context. This means you not only have access to the DOM, but you also have access to Javascript variables and functions, AJAX-loaded content, etc.
Requires Version – Node v4.0.0+, PhantomJS v.1.3+
Available Selectors – CSS
Available Data Format – JSON
Elite gamers cabal download for mac. Pros
- Easy installation and setup for more than one scraper
- Suitable for recursive crawling
Cons
- Poor documentation
Installation
To install this package with npm:
Best Use Case
If you need a web scraping tool in Javascript and JQuery
Puppeteer
Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a powerful but simple API that allows you to control Google’s headless Chrome browser. A headless browser means you have a browser that can send and receive requests but has no GUI. It works in the background, performing actions as instructed by an API. You can truly simulate the user experience, typing where they type and clicking where they click.
A headless browser is a great tool for automated testing and server environments where you don’t need a visible UI shell. For example, you may want to run some tests against a real web page, create a PDF of it, or just inspect how the browser renders a URL. Puppeteer can also be used to take screenshots of web pages visible by default when you open a web browser.
Puppeteer’s API is very similar to Selenium WebDriver, but works only with Google Chrome. Puppeteer has a more active support than Selenium, so if you are working with Chrome, Puppeteer is your best option for web scraping.
Requires Version – Node v6.4.0, Node v7.6.0 or greater
Available Selectors – CSS
Available Data Formats – JSON
Pros
- With its full-featured API, it covers a majority of use cases
- The best option for scraping Javascript websites on Chrome
Cons
- Only available for Chrome/Chromium browser
- Supports only JSON format
Installation
To install Puppeteer in your project run:
This will install Puppeteer and download the recent version of Chromium browser to run the puppeteer code. By default, puppeteer works with the Chromium browser but you can also use Chrome. You can also use the lightweight version of Puppeteer – puppeteer core. To install type the command:
Best Use Case
- If you need to test the speed, performance, responsivenes, and UI of a website.
- If you are using Chrome, Puppeteer is your best option for web scraping.
- If the information you want is generated using
Playwright
Playwright is a Node library to automate multiple browsers with a single API. It enables cross-browser web automation that is ever-green, capable, reliable, and fast. Playwright was created to improve automated UI testing by eliminating flakiness, improving the speed of execution, and offering insights into the browser operation.
Playwright is very similar to Puppeteer in many respects. The API methods are identical in most cases, and Playwright also bundles compatible browsers by default. Playwright’s biggest differentiating point is cross-browser support. It can drive Chromium, WebKit, MS Edge, and Firefox.
A noteworthy difference is that Playwright has a more powerful browser context feature than Puppeteer. This lets you simulate multiple devices with a single browser instance.
Best Web Scraping Tool
Requires Version – Node.js 10.15 or above.
Available Selectors – CSS
Available Data Formats – JSON
Pros
Best Web Browser Best Web Scraping Tools
- Cross Browser support
- Detailed documentation
Con
- They have only patched the WebKit and Firefox debugging protocols, not the actual rendering engine
Installation
To install the package:
This installs Playwright and browser binaries for Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit. Once installed, you can use Playwright in a Node.js script and automate web browser interactions.
Best use case
If you need an efficient tool as good as Puppeteer to perform UI testing but across multiple browsers, you should use Playwright.
Cheerio
Cheerio is a library that parses raw HTML and XML documents and allows you to use the syntax of jQuery while working with the downloaded data. With Cheerio, you can write filter functions to fine-tune which data you want from your selectors. If you are writing a web scraper in JavaScript, Cheerio API is a fast option that makes parsing, manipulating, and rendering efficient.
It does not – interpret the result as a web browser, produce a visual rendering, apply CSS, load external resources, or execute JavaScript. If you require any of these features, you should consider projects like PhantomJS or JSDom.
Requirements – Up to date versions of Node.js and npm
Available Selectors – CSS
Pros
- Parsing, rendering and manipulating documents is very efficient
- Flexible, Easy to Use
- Very fast (Preliminary end to end benchmarks suggests its 8x faster than JSDOM)
Cons
- Does not fare well for dynamic Javascript websites
Installation
To install the required modules using NPM, simply type the following command:
Best Use Case
If you need speed, go for Cheerio.
These are just some of the open-source javascript web scraping tools and frameworks you can use for your web scraping projects. If you have greater scraping requirements or would like to scrape on a much larger scale it’s better to use web scraping services.
If you aren’t proficient with programming or your needs are complex, or you need large volumes of data to be scraped, there are great web scraping services that will suit your requirements to make the job easier for you.
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