Octoparse Reviews

Great tool for all things related to web scraping!

Comments: Amazing - We love it! Team is great and the resigned user face looks so great!

Pros:

We love the pre-set template options and the ability to scrape the web. Team was very great on helping us great custom templates!

Cons:

We like the customer support, but since we are based in the USA… responses are not at an ideal time for our team. We know we will have to wait at least 12 hours to hear back. We'd also love more detailed tutorials on how to customize our own templates. We are new to the "web scraping" world and sometimes need a quick data extraction which are usually not worth the time or money for a legit template.

Longterm Octoparse Customer - Fan for Life

Comments: No complaints what so ever. I have had a subscription for 6 years. That says a lot.

Pros:

I appreciate how easy the application is to get basic scraping, but the standout is the support staff. They will help you or even just fix it themselves. I recently had a job need changes. I was out of the country and did not have a reliable internet connection. A quick email to support and less than a day later, I was back getting data.

Cons:

Octoparse includes many default templates, but they are "black boxes". I would really like to be able to open them and see how they are working. It would to better understand how to make my own scripts work better.

Bad company!

Comments: We tried octoparse in the free trial version but found out that their data-extraction is illegal in the EU. So we stopped. But we had to give creditcard info before we could start. They took the money but right away and refuse to refund.
So watch out with this company. It's scam and fraud and once you try to address any issue they don't react.
ONE OF THE WORST EVER !!!

Pros:

Hardly anything was good about the product and especially the company itself. It's seems like fraud!!!

Cons:

Hard to use and slow in execution and above all illegal in the EU !!!

Octoparse Is The Best Scraping Tool

Comments: Overall, Octoparse is user-friendly and powerful for web scraping, offering a simple interface and robust features. However, its performance can be inconsistent with complex tasks, and pricing may not suit everyone.

Pros:

Octoparse's best feature is its ease of use for web scraping, with a visual interface that makes complex data extraction straightforward even for non-coders.

Cons:

The biggest drawback of Octoparse is its occasional performance issues with large-scale scraping, which can lead to slower execution and data limits

Octoparse is the best scraping tool!

Comments: Excellent experience using the tool and quick customer service too. We could not run our business without Octoparse.

Pros:

- Easy to navigate user interface - Lot's of help and articles on hand - Web scraping in less than 5 mins - Lot's of great features to automate jobs - Price was reasonable

Cons:

- Maybe the time it takes to tweak your scraping jobs, however this is the case for any software tool.

Great tool, easy to learn and use

Comments: Overall I’m verry happy with the tool, it saves me and my team a lot of time.

Pros:

The easy way of setting up things and run the task, if done in a correct way you can save a lot of time.

Cons:

Sometimes when there is a new update a review of created jobs is required to ensure a smooth run.

Very efficient and reliable tool, that is very approachable.

Comments: Overall great, sometimes there are some limitations to the whole parsing thing, but they are always trying to add ways to make it easier.

Pros:

I like how responsive and intuitive (to me at least) the tool is overall. Can't do much about the websites themselves but the tool itself when everything is aligned is excellent and does the job consistently and accurately. All this without needing much more than installing one app and not having to do many things and libraries and code. The support is always available and helpful too, which is a major plus.

Cons:

There are some features that are still missing, like maybe a "production-chain" type where a task finishing triggers another task using that data, but I guess they are planning on adding many more features in the future.

Excellent, powerful tool with industry leading support

Comments: Overall Octoparse continues to be an important tool for our business. We value their excellent customer support and look forward to using the tool for many years.

Pros:

Once your project is properly setup, it is simple to run when needed. The Octoparse team is great at helping you set things up properly and they will answer any questions needed.

Cons:

There are really not many cons associated with Octoparse. Usually if there is any issue, it is centered around the data source and not the Octoparse system.

Octoparse is a reliable tool for scrape websites easier.

Comments: Octoparse is a reliable and easy scraping tool which has very strong supporting team behind.

Pros:

Continues service with least interruption rate and quick responses from the support team.

Cons:

Some tasks are not possible to modify. Also, Cloudflare bypass was limited to popular websites. Other websites might need extra credits to bypass.

Excellent Web Scraping Tool for Beginners

Comments: Easy to use. The directions are straight forward. It's been a game changer for me. I have been able import data from web to a spreadsheet in minutes, and that has decreased the manual work I had to do when retrieving data.

Pros:

Logging into sites where it is required before scraping. Editing tasks before scraping and exporting it to Excel Spreadsheets.

Cons:

I am unable to scrape documents from a downloaded file (Word/PDF doc).

Octoparse a very reliable product

Pros:

the simple UI/UX, which at the same time permits you to handle complex tasks

Cons:

some difficulties in setting up cloud runs

Powerful and easy

Comments: Great tool with ease of use and helpful support!

Pros:

Easy to use, powerful, great customer support!

Cons:

Sometimes there are REST API connection issues.

Support seems to be nonexsistent

Pros:

Unfortunately I have such a bad taste in my mouth at this point I cannot remember

Cons:

Octoparse, unfortunately, turned out to be a huge disappointment for me. I decided to try their software on a trial basis, and initially, I thought it had some potential. However, after spending only an hour using it, I realized that it didn't meet my needs, especially considering its steep price point. As a freelancer, it simply didn't fit within my budget.I made sure to cancel my trial to avoid getting stuck with an expensive monthly subscription. But to my dismay, I noticed a charge on my credit card the day after my trial ended. Immediately, I contacted Octoparse, giving them the benefit of the doubt, and explained that I believed I had canceled in time. I asked for a refund, as I had no intention of continuing to use their platform.Despite reaching out to them multiple times through various channels, I received no response for a whole week. And now, it has been a frustrating three months, and Octoparse has completely ignored my inquiries. It's incredibly disappointing to see a company offer a support email and then not bother responding to their customers. It's not just about the money, but the principle of providing decent customer support and acknowledging their mistakes.In the software industry, things may not always be perfect, but what sets companies apart is how they handle their customers and address issues. For Octoparse, I have to say, their lack of responsiveness and disregard for their customers is unacceptable. I would strongly advise them to get their

Easy to start using, no coding required.

Comments: It took me about a day to look into all available web scrapers. At the end stopped on Octoparse for couple reasons. Pros:
- Installs on Windows, so I could use spare Windows Server for scraping. No nodejs learning or programming needed.
- GUI was simple to understand, can dump a list of links that need to be scraped, select content on the page that needs to go into Excel spreadsheet and click start. That's it, no need to select specific HTML divs or write regex code. Don't know how, but this was the only scraper that could analyze and grab a specific text on the page without setting any rules, the other scrapers I've tried had a hard time and had to make complicated rules.
- During scraping opens the pages in a real browser, so Javascript, AJAX websites would work as well.
- You can export to Excel, directly to SQL, MYSQ or Oracle database, CSV, TXT or HTML file.
- You can also back up your scraped data to Octoparse as a backup, will be saved with your task.
- Configuration and scraper apps run in different programs. If one suddenly would to shut down because of some error, other Octoparse tasks would still continue to work as nothing has happened. Cons:
- Had a hard time adding a list of 50000 links into the queue, but not a problem because you can have multiple tasks 30-40K links in my case, just divide links between those tasks.
- Did not say anywhere that it was saving the tasks to their servers, so that's why probably has trouble with large tasks. On the other hand, this one is also a Pro, because you can create tasks on your computer and load them up on your server just by restarting the app. Overall:
You can have 2 active tasks running at the same time for free, if you want more, you can upgrade to a paid version. It takes about a second to open a page, so roughly you can scrape one page per second per task.
Overall this worked better than great. Did not have to ask our devs to write a scraper, the time I spent creating the scraper would be the same amount of time I would spend discussing with our devs how to scrape the content. And now devs are asking me for stats on scraped data, not the other way around. If you do any marketing and wish to gather data for stats or just create your database from any website, super easy to do, recommend it.

Best free scraper softare

Comments: We are using Octoparse to scrape pages, and we find it extremely powerful. The free tool is good for users that don't need to use many queriesm, and don't need more than 2000 results extracted. After that limit either you can buy the upgrades, or you can split the files. The wizard is simple, the advanced is rather difficult to use, if you are not a developer. We would love to use some of the advanced functionalities, if they could be 'moved' to the simple side (considering that the scraper is intended mostly for nondevelopers). The wizard mode gives you the possibility to choose between:
1. list or table extraction
2. list and detail extraction
3. URL list extraction
4. single page extraction
Depending on your needs, it could be good to extract all the fields from a single page (point 4) or extract data in the form of a table (page 1). We mainly use list and detail extraction, where you just need to provide a result page of a query on a first step, in and define the list of similar URLs you need to extract. Octoparse will detect the list automatically just after your second selection. On the next step you would need to instruct Octoparse on the fields you wish to extract. For each field, you can decide to extract the text, the inner HTML, the outer HTML, or the links behind the text (for example email addresses or internet addresses). We find this functionality extremely good. In the simple mode (free) the speed is based on your computer and on your internet speed. If you don't need to extract more than 2000 pages per time, the free version is good enough. If instead, you upgrade to the most advanced plans, you can use the speed of multiple servers CPU and run many tasks at the same time.
If the list and extraction are not providing results, because it is difficult for Octopars to find out the URLs on a result page, we do use the URL list extraction. With this functionality you simply provide the crawler with a list of similar URL you need to crawl and the rest will be done automatically.

Pros:

Free Easy to use

Cons:

Advanced features a bit complicated

Octoparse as the most friendly and intuitive web data extraction tool

Comments: I have tried about 20 web data extraction software incl. online ones and desktop apps. I have stopped at Octoparse as for me it appeared to be the best option because: 1. it offers a "linear" (in the good sense) and convergent workflow for a job versus the rather messy and distractingly branching/forking semantics of the process of other software where after a certain point you lose the touch/control because of steeply growing complexity along the steps of the workflow (this problem with other software is even more severe when the workflow steps are named in quite an arbitrary manner by the vendor leaving you without any clues as to what the given step is about or how you are supposed to carry it out, etc.);
2. its workflow is simple/straightforward, friendly and intuitive - with Octoparse you do not need hours or days of training/reading of instructions, tutorials, etc. as is the case with the other software I have tried/tried to go through; the process is highly structured and coherent in Octoparse;
3. it does not require any specialized/professional skills of any kind of coding. As a possible drawback I would point to the relatively weak consistency among the offerred 4 modes of extraction. I have noticed that there are a few inconsistencies in step logic mapping/matching across some of them, but I have not explored all of them to be honest, so this problem may in fact be less significant. Thank you.

Pros:

- it is simple, friendly, intuitive and features a linear/convergent (in the good sense) process of interaction - it does not take even hours of training/reading the instructions, tutorials - you start using it straight away - it does not require any coding skills

Cons:

- relatively weak consistency in the logics of workflow steps across/among the four modes of extraction

Octoparse is the best free solution for web scraping

Comments: Octoparse offers a free scraping GUI for everyone without coding experience. The free local extraction feature is enough for almost any business starter or data collector. I mean its great you can handle all types of pagination from infinite scroll or ajax called also including the normal button pagination. Its a nightmare to develop something like this from scratch using php. I mean Octoparse are like the middle man from the web and the perfect excel sheet with all data collected inside it formatted into columns and perfect rows just need to be adjusted into charts. Although the gui is a bit complicated for someone new to the software , the tutorials are very easy to track and the moving pictures for every step are awesome. After investing some time developing the local extraction mechanism ,you can export the project to the cloud extraction as it will be much easier to use also because that is the logical step for the next move if you want to scrap large scales of data or you dont have to worry about schedule , it is in the cloud and running smoothly. The API integration also make it easier to use the data. Exporting the data via API is one of the solutions , you also can export them in various file formats including csv. You can build mobile app directly on the API and with some patience you can get more reliable data at your hand any time. I am as a wordpress developer use the api to integrate in the wordpress itself including other plugins like the woocommerce for eCommerce platform. Giant price comparison companies use the sam emethod to scarp data and publish them to their web , we can do the same with much less work using Octoparse ! Why to re-invent the wheel ?! time is money !

Pros:

Complete framework to scarp

Cons:

GUI is a bit complicated

Octoparse is really a good data extraction tool. It helps me a lot for my academic research.

Pros:

I like Octoparse Cloud Service most. I need to update the data every day and the cloud service enables me to schedule the crawlers run daily on Octoparse cloud servers automatically without having to keep my computer on. This really save me a lot of time and help me get a lot of original data online for my academic research. Besides, I do appreciate they offer great discounts for us students. It is really helpful to me.

Cons:

Sometimes the support replied a little late. It would be better if they could reply a little earlier.

A great free web scraper to extract data online within seconds

Pros:

I use Octoparse to extract the comments on Twitter for my academic research. It did really help as you just need to make a simple crawler to extract the data online automatically. Though at first I didn't have any idea on how to make a crawler, I finally made it with the help of the detailed tutorials and support team. The free version is quite powerful since it could scrape almost every website. But I need the CLOUD SERVICE to schedule the tasks to run every day to get the updated data. That's why I choose the premium plan. With the great discounts offered specially for academic research, it's not a problem to afford that for us students.

Cons:

It couldn't solve the Captcha problem on cloud service and I had to do that in local machine if I want to extract such kind of websites.

reduce repetitive work

Comments: good value

Pros:

I was manually going through the linkedin sales navigator to check on changes to a saved search I had done. After setting up Octoparse, it grabs all the changes to my saved search and saves them into a google sheet that eliminates a lot of clicks to get to the same information. I also saved a lot of time.

Cons:

It's a point-and-click software, which takes a while. It was worth it after automating my previously manual process.

Helpful Extraction Tool!

Pros:

Point-and-Click interface. this feature makes me feel arranged while I'm using Octoparse, it's clear to see which step I am in, and what step should I do next.

Cons:

Customer Support. the customer supports dont reply instantly, sometimes it takes hours to reply my e-mails.

Easy to use

Comments: I love it. It does exactly what I want it to do no matter he simple or intricate it is.

Pros:

I love how there is a workflow diagram so I can review what I am asking the software to do. It allows me to truly customize the information I want to scrape.

Cons:

The free edition only allows for 10 scrape formulas

Octoparse is a helpful web scraping tool!

Pros:

Never knew data extraction could be such an easy thing before I discovered Octoparse. It fulfills the functions I expected, I can easily obtain data I wish now.

Cons:

I have not do any comparison with other brands, Octoparse was the first web scraping tool I ever used. If there were any con I would say it's that the websites claim users do not need to code, but users still need to learn a bunch of tutorials before use.

I am uk startup. Wish to know octoparse 2 year agos. Would be great if offer discounts for startups

Pros:

Easy to use unlimited page scraped per run

Cons:

Sometime stop working if internet not work. Paid package may sort it out

This is a very powerful and useful product for my research!

Pros:

I like how it works and its ease of usage...you don't need to be a developer for using it and it takes just few time for understanding it.

Cons:

You just need to spend few time at the beginning for setting it and make it working properly on your machine.