Selenium is an automated web testing framework and toolkit which also serves as a powerful web scraping tool. This automated browser-based testing tool has a built-in capacity to crawl websites and extract valuable data. Developers have used it to create grade-one bots to conduct market research, monitor market prices, and gather contact information.
Selenium Alternative Web Scraping Tools
Web scrapers use Selenium for automating tasks such as indexing content, filling out forms, and scraping metadata from websites. With Selenium-based scraping scripts, you can fire an HTTP request and easily parse the response for quick data extraction and analysis. Do you love the robustness and reliability of Selenium but find it limiting? The following are top alternatives that support coding, image comparison, and testing of native mobile apps.
Dexi.IO
Dexi.io is a powerful automation tool that extracts complex data from websites using a single line of code. The tool doesn’t require complex script development or programming to perform its data extraction tasks. It relies on artificial intelligence and machine learning to filter through pages and find the necessary data. The tool is superior to Selenium because it can scrape data in different formats.
Dexi.io can bypass captchas on website pages, but Selenium cannot. In cases where web scraping using Selenium fails due to ad popups, this tool works perfectly well. Also, if scraping with Selenium doesn’t work because JavaScript is running on the target website or page, Dexi.io is the perfect tool for you.
Puppeteer
Puppeteer is an open-source, scalable, and flexible project management framework that offers a visual interface for creating infrastructure automation scripts. The machine-learning-powered service can extract data from websites. It can extract structured data and help you get profound insights into raw text data.
Released by Google in 2018, Puppeteer runs on headless Chrome or Chromium. Apart from scraping via single-page automation, the tool lets you do Chrome extension testing, form submission automation, and record your website’s runtime performance.
Postman
Postman is one of the most efficient tools for scraping data from websites that support headers and authentication. It’s the perfect web scraping tool for extracting information from websites with a no-crawling policy. Unfortunately, Postman uses many system resources, including your computer’s RAM and CPU. Therefore, it’s unsuitable for large, heavy websites with more complex data.
With Postman, you can send requests from your local host or proxy server. The tool lets you view formatted JSON and HTML while supporting sending multi-step requests. You can adjust the pre-existing steps to gather more detailed data. Postman offers cloud API, making it convenient for making requests from different locations.
Scraper
Scraper is a chrome extension with an intuitive interface supporting web extraction. It’s an automated tool that lets you create new rules and schedule your requests when you deem fit. It’s also a great and powerful tool when building complex queries based on structural data. It usually saves you time and avoids time wasted due to repetitive work.
Get started using Scraper by installing the extension on your Chrome browser. Navigate the webpage you want to scrape and click on the Scraper icon, often found at the top right corner of the browser. These simple mouse clicks will command Scraper to extract the content on the page into a table in your browser window.
Webhose.IO
Webhose.io is another famous Chrome extension that you can use to automate web crawling, data collection, and storage. It is a lightweight yet efficient tool that has a simple user interface and a small footprint.
This web scraping utility for Node.js offers powerful tools for extracting data from different URLs. Additionally, this flexible and feature-rich extractor can be used in various data extraction environments.
With Webhose.io, you can custom-create well-structured queries that allow you to change the parameters and variables for more effective web scraping results. The tool saves your web scraping outputs in a JSON file, which you can import into a Python program or database using dotenv.
Conclusion
Selenium is a fantastic web scraping tool, but there are still great alternatives like the ones mentioned above. These web scraping tools are free, but you can still pay for the premium packages to get even more features. Know which web scraping tools are perfect for your specific data scraping needs and choose the one whose functionalities will work perfectly for your project’s requirements.
