Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Diffbot VS Simple Scraper

Compare Diffbot VS Simple Scraper and see what are their differences

Diffbot logo Diffbot

Get data from web pages automatically

Simple Scraper logo Simple Scraper

Extract data from any website in seconds — download instantly, scrape in the cloud, or create an API.
  • Diffbot Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-02
  • Simple Scraper Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-29

Simple scraper is the easiest way to scrape the web — turn any website into an API in seconds and use ready-made scraping recipes to scrape popular sites with ease.

Simple Scraper

$ Details
freemium $30.0 / Monthly (6,000 credits)
Release Date
2019 November

Diffbot features and specs

  • Automation
    Diffbot automates the process of extracting structured data from web pages, saving time and reducing the need for manual data entry.
  • Accuracy
    By using machine learning and AI, Diffbot provides highly accurate data extraction, reducing errors compared to manual scraping.
  • Scalability
    Diffbot can handle large-scale data extraction, making it suitable for businesses with high-volume data needs.
  • Ease of Use
    The platform is user-friendly and provides APIs and tools that simplify the process of integrating data extraction into various applications.
  • Customizable
    Diffbot offers customization options to fine-tune the data extraction process according to specific requirements, ensuring relevance and precision.

Possible disadvantages of Diffbot

  • Cost
    Diffbot can be expensive, especially for small businesses or individual developers, as pricing scales with usage.
  • Learning Curve
    While the platform is powerful, it may have a steeper learning curve for users unfamiliar with API usage or web scraping concepts.
  • Dependency
    Relying on an external service like Diffbot can create dependencies, meaning any downtime or changes in the service can impact your operations.
  • Limited Control
    Using an automated service can limit the control users have over the data extraction process compared to custom-built scrapers.
  • Compliance
    There may be concerns about compliance with website terms of service or legal regulations regarding data scraping, which users need to manage responsibly.

Simple Scraper features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    SimpleScraper offers a user-friendly interface that allows even those without technical knowledge to easily extract data from websites.
  • Speed
    The tool allows for fast data extraction, reducing the time needed to gather information manually.
  • Automation
    Users can set up automated scraping tasks to run at regular intervals, which is useful for keeping data up-to-date without manual intervention.
  • API Access
    SimpleScraper provides API access, allowing developers to integrate scraping functionality into their own applications seamlessly.
  • Browser Extension
    The tool offers a browser extension, making it convenient to set up scraping tasks directly from the browser.

Possible disadvantages of Simple Scraper

  • Cost
    Advanced features and higher usage limits come with a subscription fee, which may not be feasible for all users.
  • Website Restrictions
    Some websites employ measures to prevent scraping, which may limit the effectiveness of SimpleScraper on such sites.
  • Data Quality
    Automated scraping can sometimes result in incomplete or inaccurate data, requiring manual verification.
  • Learning Curve
    Though designed to be user-friendly, there can still be a learning curve for those completely new to web scraping.
  • Resource Intensive
    Running multiple or complex scraping tasks can be resource-intensive and may affect the performance of your system.

Diffbot videos

Correcting Diffbot API Output Using the Custom API Toolkit

Simple Scraper videos

Super Simple Scraper Review

More videos:

  • Review - Super Simple Scraper RevieW
  • Review - Scraping with Simple Scraper in under 30 seconds

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Diffbot and Simple Scraper)
Web Scraping
60 60%
40% 40
Data Extraction
71 71%
29% 29
Web Scraping And Crawling
API Tools
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Diffbot and Simple Scraper

Diffbot Reviews

Best Data Scraping Tools
Diffbot uses computer vision, unlike any other tools to identify relevant information on a page. As long as the page looks the same visually, the web scrapers will never break even if the HTML structures change.
Creating an Automated Text Extraction Workflow — Part 1
The 600 lbs gorilla, Diffbot, comes with a swath of solid APIs but starts at $300, which is ridiculous if you’re just extracting text. Scrapinghub’s News API, Extractor API, and plenty more are better priced if you want an affordable alternative; plus, Extractor API includes a visual online tool for extracting hundreds of articles at once, if you want to do things via UI.
Source: medium.com

Simple Scraper Reviews

We have no reviews of Simple Scraper yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Simple Scraper seems to be a lot more popular than Diffbot. While we know about 20 links to Simple Scraper, we've tracked only 1 mention of Diffbot. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Diffbot mentions (1)

  • Social Impact Trends / Emergent Issues using Data Science
    I work in non-profit/social impact and I'm trying to get a snapshot of themes/issues that concern a subset of organizations (say a total of 500) in our network via news/articles that these orgs may have published or that these orgs may have been referenced in within the last 30-60 days. Using Diffbot (diffbot.com), I can get a list of articles, news, content etc. That relate to these orgs. Understandably, this... Source: almost 3 years ago

Simple Scraper mentions (20)

  • Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (October 2024)
    Making my data extraction Saas (https://simplescraper.io) more LLM friendly. Markdown extraction, improved Google search, workflows - search for this terms, visit the first N links, summarize etc. Big demand for (or rather, expectation of) this lately. - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago
  • The Architecture Behind a One-Person Tech Startup
    Things are much easier for one-person startups these days—it's a gift. I remember building a todo app as my first SaaS project, and choosing something called Stormpath for authentication. It subsequently shut down, forcing me to do a last-minute migration from a hostel in Japan using Nitrous Cloud IDE (which also shut down). Just pain upon pain.[1] Now, you can just pick a full-stack cloud service and run with it.... - Source: Hacker News / 11 months ago
  • A list of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings that have free tiers of interest to devops and infradev
    Simplescraper — Trigger your webhook after each operation. The free plan includes 100 cloud scrape credits. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
    I run Simplescraper (https://simplescraper.io). Started in 2020 and it's now profitable. > Have any recent trends affected your business? Not really. People like data as much as ever. As a one-person biz, the main dilemma remains how to juggle development, marketing and support. Reaching a point where the price of context-switching to customer support is becoming a little too high. But that's easily fixable and... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
  • Experimental library for scraping websites using OpenAI's GPT API
    > perhaps you can simply ask the API to create Python or JS code that is deterministic, instead. Had a conversation last week with a customer that did exactly that - spent 15 minutes in chatGPT generating working Scrapy code. Neat to see people solve their own problem so easily but it doesn't yet erode our value. I run https://simplescraper.io and a lot of value is integrations,scale, proxies, scheduling,... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Diffbot and Simple Scraper, you can also consider the following products

import.io - Import. io helps its users find the internet data they need, organize and store it, and transform it into a format that provides them with the context they need.

Octoparse - Octoparse provides easy web scraping for anyone. Our advanced web crawler, allows users to turn web pages into structured spreadsheets within clicks.

Apify - Apify is a web scraping and automation platform that can turn any website into an API.

Content Grabber - Content Grabber is an automated web scraping tool.

ParseHub - ParseHub is a free web scraping tool. With our advanced web scraper, extracting data is as easy as clicking the data you need.

Diggernaut - Web scraping is just became easy. Extract any website content and turn it into datasets. No programming skills required.