Top Web Scraping Frameworks

Web scraping is used to gather and analyze data from the web. Every client might require a different service. According to each client’s different needs, there are different frameworks for different types of web scraping.

We have listed here some of the top web scraping frameworks for you.

• Scrapy
• MechanicalSoup
• Jaunt
• Jauntium
• Strom Crawler and
• Norconex

These are some of the popular web scraping frameworks.  Each Framework has its own advantages and disadvantages. Not every Framework will be suitable for your purpose. So have a deep look at the benefits below and choose the best for you. Now let us have a detailed look at each Framework.

Scrapy

Scrapy is a collaborative framework and is also an open-source framework. It is also an easy, effective, and reliable way to extract data from the web. The Framework is based on python. It provides a complete set of completely asynchronous libraries to accept requests quickly and process them into data.

Since all of these steps have to happen quickly, the asynchronous libraries provided will help in that.

There are a lot of benefits when you use scrapy.

• It is super fast
• Does not use much memory
• The algorithm of scrapy is efficient.
• A developer or an organization can customize the same word easily by adding a pipeline or middleware.
• The Framework of scrapy is similar in many ways to the Djano framework.

You can learn this Framework from many legitimate websites online.

MechanicalSoup

MechanicalSoup is a framework that is used to simulate human behavior on websites. It is based on an already existing library called Beautifulsoup.

The benefits of using MechanicalSoup are,

• It has a neat library with very little coding.
• The Framework works super fast when it comes to simple pages.
• It can stimulate human behavior.
• It supports CSS and XPath selectors.

This Framework can be used when you wait for an event to happen or while opening a popup. The uses of this Framework cannot be limited to data scraping.

Jaunt

Jaunt is an important framework that specializes in automated scraping and obtaining JSON based data. Obtaining data in the form of JSON is very convenient and common now. It helps in tracking every HTTP request and ensures that all responses are being executed.

The uses of Jaunt are,

• Jaunt is an organized framework.
• It can cater to all of your web scraping needs.
• Provides JSON based querying of data
• You can control both HTTP requests and responses.
• It is easily interfaceable with the REST APIs.
• Support both HTTP and HTTPS proxy

One drawback of this Framework is that it does not support JavaScript-based websites.

Jauntium

Jauntium is a slightly developed version of the jaunt. Jauntium Supports not only JavaScript-based websites but also has additional features.

• It can create web bots to scrape through the web pages and extract data.
• It can search and manipulate the data object model.
• You can write test cases to accelerate its scraping ability.

Its ability to support JavaScript-based websites is a huge plus. This makes Jauntium far better than Jaunt. This Framework is much preferred when you want to test some automated processes across different browsers.

Storm Crawler

Storm Crawler is a fully packed Java-based web framework. This Framework is used to build a climbable and optimized crawling solution in Java. This Framework for crawling is used when URLs are sent directly to the stream.

Benefits of Storm Crawler are,

• Highly reliable and used for repetitive calls
• The Framework is strong in nature.
• The management of the thread in this Framework is extremely well to reduce the tension while crawling.
• The library provided can be added or extended to the other libraries.
• The crawling algorithms provided with a strong crawler are more efficient compared to other crawling algorithms.

Norconex

Narconex is an HTTP collector framework. This Framework is mainly used to build an enterprise crawler. The Framework will be available as a binary compiled together, and you can use it on almost all platforms.

This is an open-source crawler that is fast and flexible.

Perks of Narconex,

• In a normal server, this Framework can crawl into a million pages if needed.
• It can reach the unreached. Narconex crawls into documents like PDF, Word, and HTML format documents.
• It extracts information directly from the documents and processes it.
• Language detection is available.
• You can determine how fast this Framework can crawl.
• Since it is rapid, you make it run repeatedly over the same pages to look for any updated information.

This Framework goes well with Java and also other commands.

Conclusion

If a developer has a good knowledge of any programming language, it will be easy to use these frameworks. There is no comparison between the best and the worst here. If it works well for your business, then you can go for it. Since all of these frameworks are for free, you can try whichever you feel suitable for your website. Open-source frameworks are also free to use. You can also try one of them.

Ulani Uriah

Umar Nisar was born and raised in the busy city of Abbottabad. As a journalist, Umar Nisar has contributed to many online publications including PAK Today and the Huffing Post. In regards to academics, Umar Nisar earned a degree in business from the Abbottabad UST, Havelian. Umar Nisar follows the money and covers all aspects of emerging tech here at The Hear Up.

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