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ScraperAPI
What Is ScraperAPI?
ScraperAPI handles proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs, so you can get the HTML from any web page with a simple API call.
With anti-bot detection and bypassing built into the API you never need to worry about having your requests blocked.
We automatically prune slow proxies from our pools and guarantee unlimited bandwidth.
Additionally, developers provide their own interface, which can be used to pull content from websites in different ways. The program can handle the security measures on such target pages and thus search the websites and access the content. A knowledge of Java, PHP and Python is helpful.
Who Uses ScraperAPI?
ScraperAPI is a tool designed for developers and IT companies. A technical understanding of Java, Ruby, PHP, Node, Bash or Python is helpful for using this tool.
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Reviews of ScraperAPI
Alternatives Considered:
Using ScraperAPI in scholarly-python-package
Comments: Google has been pretty good at blocking programmatic requests even for non-commercial, self-archival purposes and ScraperAPI has been extremely effective and getting around those. While getting the requests routed through ScraperAPI has been much slower than say, routing it through one of the free proxy servers,
Pros:
The ease of use and the fact that there were multiple ways of using it made this desirable. The simple API usage let me prototype and decide what element I need to look for, and used the proxy method in the software to make the integration seamless.
Cons:
ScraperAPI does not allow for web elements to be rendered, at least not until I am on the most expensive plan. While this has not been limiting so far, the lack of this feature has led me to use ScraperAPI along with other proxy methods as opposed to using ScraperAPI exclusively.
ScraperAPI Response
3 years ago
Hi Arun, thank you for your review! You are correct, at the moment only our Business and Enterprise plans offer JS Rendering, but we are working on offering them for the lower volume plans as well. Stay tuned!
Alternatives Considered:
Great Value to access web pages behind protection for a decent price
Comments: We are a Data Acquisition company, Due to our scale we were struggling to build and maintain inhouse solutions to avoid bot detection. The proxy service such as Luminati are impossible for us to afford and we cannot also hire a developer to work on our in-house solution. Scraper API provides us with an easy to use scraping option for tougher sites without any commitment in a fraction of cost.
Pros:
I love that I am able to access Amazon, g2.com, or any website with protection with even the basic package without JS. This allows to do data acquisition faster and at cheaper rates. Also, I like the pricing models(no commitments), 29 USD for 250k requests which serves our purpose perfectly. Also, Shout out to [SENSITIVE CONTENT] in support who helped to resolve a billing issue in a day.
Cons:
I wish they allowed the remaining credits to be rolled over to the next month. If this is implemented, it would even provide a lot of value to startups such as ours
ScraperAPI Response
3 years ago
Hi! Thank you for your review! Although we do not allow rolling over credits, we are currently working on a feature that will do something similar. Stay tuned!
Prices increased by 1000% and quality degraded like crazy
Pros:
Back in the day it was the cheapest scraping provider, they charged by request no matter if you used JS or not.
Cons:
I couldn't use up my credits any more because over 80% of the requests were failing.
ScraperAPI Response
2 years ago
Hello, thanks for leaving us a review. You're right in that we increased the pricing recently. The price increase was done in three ways (domain/credits based, monthly price and feature/credits) this means that users that scrape small sites still pay a cheap price while bigger and harder pages to scrape pay slightly more compensated by a higher success rates for those pages. Features are now added to more or less all plans and users get the option to use them and get charged with credits rather than paying an extra flat fee monthly for the same feature (which was our previous model). Nevertheless, ScraperAPI always was and still is one of the cheapest scraping providers (and we aim to remain one of the cheapest), especially when it comes to data extraction from major platforms, such as Google or Amazon. We are more than happy to to offer you a customised plan that would fit your needs, just get in touch via [email protected] and someone there will help you out.
Alternatives Considered:
Why pay a lot of money for manufacturer APIs when there is ScraperAPI?
Comments: If I review my ScraperAPI experience, I can come to the conclusion that it is great software for me and my company.
Pros:
ScraperAPI's cheap price and variety of API services are my favorite features.
Cons:
My least favorite feature of ScraperAPI is that some APIs are too restrictive.
Essential Tool for Scraping.
Pros:
We use this tool to scrape publically available profiles on Instagram and it has worked wonderfully for most of the time. The price is also cheaper than other scrapers I've found and/or use. There are times when the success drops, but they never charge for failures and always work on a fix. Unfortunately, right now is one of the times with a low success rate, but it still works whereas the other scraper I tried didn't work at all (to be fair I didn't contact them about it, so as to give them an opportunity to fix it). Thank you for always working on this, and I hope to be able to use this tool for as long as we require this data for our product. :)
Cons:
The thing I like the least is the low success times (we only have this issue with Instagram).
ScraperAPI Response
2 years ago
Hi Michael, thanks for the review! At the moment we don't scrape Instagram unfortunately so that is the reason for the low success rates. Otherwise, you're good to scrape pretty much any other page out there.
