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16 Best Open-Source Web Scraper for 2024 (Frameworks & Libraries)

Do you know that with open source web scrapers, you can gain total control over your scraping procedures? This article will show you the best open-source web scrapers you can use for your web scraping.

Consider both the level of control you desire and the data you need when selecting a web scraper. You may not get all the features or duplicate the type of content you want from a scraper, even though you can select what you want to extract. Open-source web scrapers are the best bet for avoiding this.

Anyone can look at and make changes to open-source software. Copyright holders grant the public the freedom to alter their software's source code for any reason. You should use an open-source web scraper if you want full authority over the scraping procedure.

A web scraper that is free and open-source allows you to quickly and comprehensively extract data from websites. Open source web scrapers are the only option for those with programming skills. There is no need to go with anything else.


16 Best Open Source Web Scrapers in 2024


1. Apify SDK — Best Open-Source Web Scraper for High-Performance and Large-scale Scraping

  • Language: JavaScript
  • Data Format: JSON

The first Open-Source Web Scraper on this list is Apify. Built for the Node.js platform, the Apify SDK is a massively scalable web scraper. A web scraper for JavaScript makes a lot of sense because JavaScript is the language of the Internet. The Apify SDK, on the other hand, fills that void. Playwright, Cheerio, and Puppeteer are just some of the widely used web scraping and crawling software built into this package.

Rather than just scraping the web, you can automate your online activities with this library's full-featured automation tool. On the Apify platform or with your own code, this feature is available. It's a strong tool that's also quite user-friendly.


2. Scrapy (Python) — Powerful and Fast Open-Source Web Scraper for Developing High-Performing and Scalable Web Scraper

  • Language: Python
  • Data Format: CSV, XML, JSON

Scrapy has the second spot on this list of best open-source web scraper. For building scalable and high-performance online scrapers, you should use the Scrapy web scraping framework. As a web scraping framework, Python is the most common programming language among web scraper developers, which is why this is the most prominent framework for web scrapers. Scrapinghub, a well-known name in the web scraping sector, maintains this system as an open-source application.

In addition to being quick and strong, Scrapy is remarkably easy to extend with new features. The fact that it's a comprehensive framework with an HTTP library and a parser tool is one of its many appealing features.


3. PySpider (Python) — Best Open-Source Web Scraper for Coding High-Performance and Powerful Web Scrapers

The next on this list is PySpider. Scalable web scrapers can also be built with the PySpider framework. It is obvious from the name that this is a python-based program. Web scrapers can benefit from this framework, which was originally designed for creating web crawlers.

A WebUI script editor and project manager are just some of the capabilities included in this program. Many databases are supported by the PySpider. One of its advantages over Scrapy is that it has the capacity to crawl JavaScript pages, which Scrapy does not have.


4. Beautiful Soup — Reliable Open-Source Web Scraper for Pulling Data from XML and HTML Files

  • Language: Python

The third open-source web scraper is Beautiful Soup. A Python library for fast-turnaround projects like screen-scanning is included. You can use Beautiful Soup's basic methods and Pythonic idioms to navigate the parse tree, search for what you need, and alter it. The amount of code required to create an application is minimal.

It converts all incoming and outgoing documents to Unicode and UTF-8 automatically. If Beautiful Soup cannot detect an encoding since the document does not provide one, then you should not worry about encodings. After that, all you have to do is specify the source encoding.

You can experiment with different parsing algorithms or sacrifice speed for flexibility by using Beautiful Soup on top of popular Python parsers like lxml and html5lib.


5. MechanicalSoup — An Easy-to-Use Open-Source Web Scraper Best for Online Task Automation

  • Language: Python

This Python-based framework, MechanicalSoup, is used to build web scrapers. Web scraping is a great usage of this technology because it can be used to automate online chores. JavaScript-based activities are not supported, which means they cannot be used to scrape JavaScript-rich webpages.

Because it resembles Requests and BeautifulSoup's basic APIs, you'll have no trouble getting started with MechanicalSoup. Using this program is a breeze because of the detailed instructions that come with it.


6. Apache Nutch — Highly Scalable and Extensible Open-Source Web Scraper Best for Creating Plug-ins for Retrieving Data and Parsing Media-type

  • Language: JAVA

You can use Apache as a strong web scraper in your program. The Apache Nutch is a wonderful option if you want a web scraper that is routinely updated. This web crawler has been around for a long and is considered mature due to the fact that it is ready for production.

An open-source project called Nutch is being used by Oregon State University to replace Googletm as the university's search engine. The Apache Software Foundation is the source of this web scraper, which makes it unique. Open source and fully free.


7. StormCrawler — Best for Building Low-Latency and Web Scraping Optimization

  • Language: JAVA

In order to build high-performance web scrapers and crawlers, StormCrawler is a Software Development Kit (SDK). This is a distributed web scraper development platform based on Apache Storm. The SDK has been put to the test and has proven to be scalable, durable, easy to extend, and efficient in its current form.

Despite the fact that it was created for a distributed architecture, you can still use it for your small-scale web scraping project, and it will function. For what it was built for, data retrieval speeds are among the fastest in the industry.


8. Node-Crawler — Powerful Open-Source Web Scraper Best for Web Scraper and Crawler Development

  • Language: JavaScript

Node-Crawler has a Node.js module that can be used to build web crawlers and scrapers. This Node.js library has a lot of web scraping features bundled into a small package. A distributed scraping architecture, hard-coded coding, and non-blocking asynchronous IO are all features that make it ideal for the scraper's asynchronous pipeline technique. Cheerio is used to query and parse DOM elements, but other DOM parsers can be used in its place. These features make this application both time- and money-saving.


9. Juant — Reliable and Trusted Open-Source Web Scraper Best for Web Automation and Web Scraping

  • Language: JAVA

To facilitate the creation of web automation solutions, the Juant open-source project was created. It has a headless browser built-in, so you can automate tasks without having to show that you're using something else. You can quickly perform web scraping operations using this program.

A browser without a graphical user interface can be used to view websites, download their content, and extract the necessary data. There are many advantages to using Juant for scraping JavaScript-rich pages, including the ability to render and execute JavaScript.


10. Portia — Authentic Open-Source Web Scraper Best for Scraping Websites Virtually

Portia is the next in line on this list. Because it was designed for a distinct audience, the Portia web scraper is a unique breed of web scraper altogether. In contrast to the other tools in this post, Portia has been designed to be used by anyone, regardless of their level of coding expertise.

Open-source program Portia is a visual scraper for websites. It is possible to annotate web pages in order to define what data you want to be extracted, and Portia will then be able to scrape data from comparable pages based on these annotations.


11. Crawley — Best for Python Web Scraper Development

  • Language: Python

For constructing web scrapers, Crawley is the best Python-based framework. Non-Blocking I/O operations and Eventlet are used to build this framework. Relational and non-relational databases are also supported by the Crawley framework. You can use XPath or Pyquery to extract data with this tool.

Crawley has a jQuery-like library for the Python programming language called Pyquery. You can scrape websites that require a login since Crawley has built-in cookie handling capabilities, which makes it useful for scraping websites that require a user to log into.


12. WebCollector — A Reliable Open-Source Web Scraper for High-Performance Web Scraper Development

Java programmers can use the WebCollector, a tough web scraper, and crawler. With its guidance, you can create high-performing web scrapers for scraping information off of websites. Its extensibility via plugins is one of the features you'll enjoy most about this library. Using this library in your own projects is simple. You can contribute to the development of this library on GitHub, where it is available as an open-source project.


13. WebMagic — Best Open-Source Web Scraper for Data Extraction from HTML Pages

WebMagic is a web scraper with a lot of options. Using Maven, you can download and use a Java-based scraping tool. Using WebMagic to scrape data from JavaScript-enhanced websites is not recommended because it does not support JavaScript rendering and is therefore not suitable for that use case.

You can easily integrate the library into your project thanks to its simple API interface. The entire web scraping and the crawling process are covered, including downloading, URL management, content extraction, and persistence.


14. Crawler4j — Easy-to-Use Open-Source Web Scraper Best for Data Scraping Off Web Pages

  • Language: JAVA

Crawler4j has a Java library for crawling and scraping web pages. The tool is straightforward to set up and use because of its simple APIs. You can build up a multithreaded web scraper in just a few minutes and use it to harvest data from the Internet. Only the WebCrawler class must be extended in order to manage the downloading of pages and select which URLs should be crawled.

They provide a step-by-step guide to the library's features. On GitHub, you can see it in action. As an open-source library, you are free to make contributions if you see a need to improve the existing code.


15. Web-Harvest (Java) — Best Open-Source Web Scraper for Collecting Data from Helpful and Useful Data from Specified Web Pages

  • Language: JAVA

As a web extraction tool designed in Java for Java developers, the Web-Harvest library is a useful resource for creating web scrapers. Web queries and page downloads can be sent and received via an API that is included in this tool's package. It can parse content from a downloaded web document, as well (HTML document).

Variable manipulation, exceptional handling, conditional operations, HTML and XML handling, looping, and file handling are all supported by this utility. It is free and ideal for creating Java-based web scrapers.


16. Heritrix (JavaScript) — A High Extensibility Open-Source Web Scraper Best for Crawl Monitoring and Operator Control

  • Language: JAVA

Unlike the other tools described on this list, Heritrix can be used as a thorough crawler to search the Internet. The Internet Archive designed it specifically for online archiving. A JavaScript-based crawler was used for this project. The Heritrix tool, on the other hand, was created to adhere to the robots.txt file directions, unlike the method described above.

Similar to the last tool, this one is also free to use. Open-source software allows everyone to participate and improve upon it. Using this one, you won't have difficulty collecting a huge amount of data because it has been thoroughly tested.


FAQs

Q. What are the functions of open source web scrapers?

Many web scrapers exist; however, open-source web scrapers are among the most powerful since they enable users to code their own applications according to their framework or source code.


Conclusion

You don't have to pay for a framework or library to use web scraping with open-source tools. When it comes to your workflow, you'll find that it's enhanced. To see the code that powers these web crawlers and scrapers, as well as to contribute to the code base, providing the maintainers allow it.

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