Web Crawlers

Web crawlers enable businesses to extract data from the web, converting the largest unstructured data source into structured data

Web is the largest source of public information however due to formatting issues and UX changes, it requires manual effort to get consistent/high quality data from web sources. Web crawlers, with the help of pattern recognition techniques, help users overcome these difficulties and leverage the largest source of public information

Web crawlers are also called web scrapers, web data extractors or collectors.

To be categorized as a web crawler, a product must provide an:

  • Interface (code or graphics based) for building web crawlers
  • Bot management module to start/stop/control bot activities
If you’d like to learn about the ecosystem consisting of Web Crawler and others, feel free to check AIMultiple Data.

Compare Best Web Crawler

Verified by
Join
Results: 27

AIMultiple is data driven. Evaluate 27 services based on comprehensive, transparent and objective AIMultiple scores.
For any of our scores, click the information icon to learn how it is calculated based on objective data.

*Products with visit website buttons are sponsored

Web Crawler Leaders

According to the weighted combination of 7 data sources

Bright Data Web Scraper IDE

Hevo Data

Price2Spy

Octoparse

Phantombuster

What are Web Crawler market leaders?

Taking into account the latest metrics outlined below, these are the current web crawler market leaders. Market leaders are not the overall leaders since market leadership doesn’t take into account growth rate.

Bright Data Web Scraper IDE

Price2Spy

Hevo Data

Phantombuster

Octoparse

What are the most mature Web Crawlers?

Which web crawler companies have the most employees?

26 employees work for a typical company in this solution category which is 5 more than the number of employees for a typical company in the average solution category.

In most cases, companies need at least 10 employees to serve other businesses with a proven tech product or service. 19 companies with >10 employees are offering web crawler. Top 3 products are developed by companies with a total of 1k employees. The largest company building web crawler is Bright Data with more than 400 employees.

Bright Data
Oxylabs
Dexi
Scrapinghub
Smartproxy

What are the Web Crawlers growing their number of reviews fastest?


We have analyzed reviews published in the last months. These were published in 4 review platforms as well as vendor websites where the vendor had provided a testimonial from a client whom we could connect to a real person.

These solutions have the best combination of high ratings from reviews and number of reviews when we take into account all their recent reviews.

What is the average customer size?

According to customer reviews, most common company size for web crawler customers is 1-50 Employees. Customers with 1-50 Employees make up 49% of web crawler customers. For an average Data solution, customers with 1-50 Employees make up 21% of total customers.

Overall
Customer Service
Ease of Use
Likelihood to Recommend
Value For Money

Customer Evaluation

These scores are the average scores collected from customer reviews for all Web Crawlers. Web Crawlers is most positively evaluated in terms of "Customer Service" but falls behind in "Likelihood to Recommend".

Web crawling is a true Swiss army knife like Excel, therefore we will stick to the most obvious use cases here:

  • Competitive analysis: Knowing your competitor's campaigns, product launches, price changes, new customers etc. can be invaluable in competitive markets. Crawlers can be set to produce alarms and reports to inform your sales, marketing and strategy teams. For example, Amazon sellers set up price monitoring bots to ensure that their products remain in the correct relative position compared to the competition. Things can take an unexpected turn when two companies automatically update their prices based on one another's price changes. Such automated pricing bots led a book to reach a $23m sales price.
  • Track customers: While competition rarely kills companies, failing to understand changing customer demands can be far more damaging. Crawling customers' websites can help better understand their business and identify opportunities to serve them.
  • Extract leads: Emails and contact information of potential customers can be crawled for building a lead funnel. For example, [email protected][domain].com email addresses get hundreds of sales pitches as these get added into companies' lead funnels
  • Enable data-driven decision making: Even today, most business decisions rely on a subset of the available relevant data. Leveraging the world's largest database, internet, for data-driven decision making makes sense especially for important decisions where cost of crawling would be insignificant.

First, user needs to communicate the relevant content to the crawler. For the technically savvy, this can be done by programming a crawler. For those with less technical skills, there are tens of web crawlers with GUIs (Graphical User Interface) which let users select the relevant data

Then, user starts the crawler using a bot management module. Crawling tends to take time (e.g. 10-20 pages per minute in the starter packages of most crawlers). This is because the web crawler visits the pages to be crawled like a regular browser and copies the relevant information. If you tried doing this manually, you would quickly get visual tests to verify that you are human. This test is called a CAPTCHA "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". Websites have variety of methods like CAPTCHA to stop such automated behavior. Web crawlers rely on methods like changing their IP adresses and digital fingerprints to make their automated behavior less noticeable

Web crawlers extract data from websites. Websites are designed for human interaction so they include a mix of structured data like tables, semi-structured data like lists and unstructured data like text. Web crawlers analyze the patterns in websites to extract and transform all these different types of data.

Crawlers are useful when data is spread over multiple pages which makes it difficult for a human to copy the data

Legality of crawling is currently a gray area and the Linkedin's lawsuit against hiQ which is still in progress, will likely create the first steps of a legal framework around data crawling. In case you are betting your business on crawling, for now don't.

Unless severe restrictions are placed crawling, crawling will remain an important tool in the corporate toolbox. Leading web crawling companies claim to work with Fortune 500 companies like PwC and P&G. BusinessInsider claims in a paywalled article that hedgefunds spend billions on crawling.

We will update this as the Linkedin vs HiQ case comes to a close. Please note that this does not constitute legal advice.