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Distill Web Monitor VS Scrapy

Compare Distill Web Monitor VS Scrapy and see what are their differences

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Distill Web Monitor logo Distill Web Monitor

Distill is a web monitoring tool. It can monitor RSS feeds, a webpage or a part of webpage. Alerts in the form of pop-up, audio or emails can be received.

Scrapy logo Scrapy

Scrapy | A Fast and Powerful Scraping and Web Crawling Framework
  • Distill Web Monitor Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-07

Distill is a web monitoring tool. It can monitor RSS feeds, a webpage or a part of webpage. Alerts in the form of pop-up, audio or emails can be received.

Featured highlights:

• Content selection from any webpage including iframes. • Supported actions: • Push notifications on phone • Pop-up • Audio • Email • SMS • Webhook • Easy to use inbox style Watchlist with label, trash etc. • Conditions for smart actions. • History of previous changes for each monitor. • Powerful expressions to select source content. Supports XPath expression, CSS rule or JavaScript expression to select content. • View highlighted changes.

  • Scrapy Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-11

Distill Web Monitor features and specs

  • User-Friendly Interface
    Distill Web Monitor features an intuitive and easy-to-navigate interface, making it accessible even for users with limited technical skills.
  • Multi-Platform Support
    It supports multiple browsers and platforms including Chrome, Firefox, and iOS, providing flexibility for users.
  • Customizable Notifications
    Users can tailor notification settings to receive alerts via email, SMS, or push notifications, ensuring they stay informed in real-time.
  • Advanced Monitoring Options
    Offers a range of monitoring options including visual comparison, text recognition, and element-based tracking, catering to various monitoring needs.
  • Free Version Available
    A free basic version of Distill Web Monitor is available, allowing users to try out the service before committing to a paid plan.

Possible disadvantages of Distill Web Monitor

  • Limited Features in Free Plan
    The free version has limited functionalities, such as fewer checks and longer intervals, which may be inadequate for intensive monitoring needs.
  • Pricing
    The cost of premium plans can be relatively high for individuals or small businesses, potentially limiting accessibility for cost-sensitive users.
  • Resource-Intensive
    Running continuous monitoring can consume significant system resources, particularly affecting performance on lower-end hardware.
  • Learning Curve
    While the interface is user-friendly, some of the advanced features and customization options may require a learning curve for less tech-savvy users.
  • Privacy Concerns
    Monitoring sensitive or personal data on some websites could present privacy risks, depending on the sites being tracked and how data is handled.

Scrapy features and specs

  • Efficiency
    Scrapy is designed to be efficient and robust, capable of handling multiple tasks simultaneously and scraping large websites in a fast and reliable manner.
  • Built-in Tooling
    Scrapy comes with built-in tools for handling common tasks such as following links, extracting data using XPath and CSS, and exporting data in a variety of formats.
  • Customization
    Scrapy offers extensive customization options, allowing users to build complex spiders and modify their behavior through middleware and pipelines.
  • Python Integration
    Being a Python framework, Scrapy integrates seamlessly with the Python ecosystem, enabling the use of libraries like Pandas, NumPy, and others to process and analyze scraped data.
  • Community Support
    Scrapy has a large and active community, providing extensive documentation, tutorials, and third-party extensions to enhance functionality.
  • Asynchronous Processing
    Scrapy’s asynchronous processing model enhances performance by allowing multiple concurrent requests, reducing the time required for crawling sites.

Possible disadvantages of Scrapy

  • Steep Learning Curve
    For beginners, Scrapy's comprehensive feature set and the need for understanding concepts like XPath and CSS selectors can be challenging.
  • Resource Intensive
    Scrapy can be resource-intensive, potentially consuming significant memory and CPU, which can be problematic for scraping very large websites or running multiple spiders simultaneously.
  • Debugging Complexity
    Debugging Scrapy projects can be complex due to its asynchronous nature and the multiple layers of middleware and pipelines that need to be understood.
  • Overhead for Small Projects
    For simple or small-scale scraping tasks, the overhead of setting up and configuring a Scrapy project might be excessive, with simpler alternatives being more suitable.
  • Limited JavaScript Support
    Scrapy's out-of-the-box support for JavaScript-heavy websites is limited, requiring additional tools like Splash or Selenium, which can complicate the setup.
  • Dependency Management
    Managing Scrapy's dependencies and compatibility with other Python packages can sometimes be challenging, leading to potential conflicts and maintenance overhead.

Analysis of Distill Web Monitor

Overall verdict

  • Overall, Distill Web Monitor is a reliable and efficient tool for those needing to keep up with web page changes. Its robust set of features and ease of use make it a strong choice for both personal and professional use.

Why this product is good

  • Distill Web Monitor is considered good due to its user-friendly interface, customizable monitoring features, and compatibility with various websites. It allows users to track changes on web pages and receive alerts, making it ideal for monitoring price changes, product availability, and content updates.

Recommended for

  • Individuals tracking price changes on e-commerce websites
  • Professionals who need to follow content updates on competitors' sites
  • Researchers who want to monitor specific changes in online publications
  • Anyone interested in receiving timely alerts for changes in web content

Analysis of Scrapy

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Scrapy is a good option for those looking to implement web scraping projects due to its robust set of features, active community, and comprehensive documentation. It is particularly well-suited for projects that require scraping from multiple websites and processing large volumes of data efficiently.

Why this product is good

  • Scrapy is a popular open-source web crawling framework for Python that's designed for extensive, flexible, and efficient web scraping. Its built-in tools and features make it easy to extract data from websites quickly and automatically. Key advantages include its ability to handle requests asynchronously, its support for multiple protocols, its item pipeline feature that allows for data cleaning and storage, and its ease of integration with other Python libraries and databases.

Recommended for

    Scrapy is recommended for developers, data scientists, and businesses that need to gather data from websites efficiently. It's particularly useful for projects involving data aggregation, market research, competitive analysis, and monitoring pricing changes across various platforms.

Distill Web Monitor videos

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Scrapy videos

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Python Scrapy Tutorial - 22 - Web Scraping Amazon

More videos:

  • Demo - Scrapy - Overview and Demo (web crawling and scraping)
  • Review - GFuel LemoNADE Taste Test & Review! | Scrapy

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Distill Web Monitor and Scrapy)

Distill Web Monitor

Scrapy

Monitoring Tools
100 100%
Monitoring Tools
0% 0
Web Scraping
0 0%
Web Scraping
100% 100
Website Monitoring
100 100%
Website Monitoring
0% 0
Data Extraction
0 0%
Data Extraction
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 Distill Web Monitor and Scrapy

Distill Web Monitor Reviews

  1. Tarun Jain
    Great tool to keep track of competitor's website

    One of the best tools I have used to keep track of changes on my competitors website. I love the chrome extension and its ease of use.

    👍 Pros:    Advanced features|Easy to use|Chrome extension available|Sync across all my devices

Scrapy Reviews

Top 15 Best TinyTask Alternatives in 2022
The software is simply deployable via the cloud, or you can host the spiders on your server using Scrapy. Only the rules need to be written; Scrapy will take care of the rest to separate the facts. With Scrapy’s portability and ability to run on Windows, Linux, Mac, and BSD platforms, new features can be added without affecting the program’s core.
Source: www.dashtech.org

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Scrapy seems to be a lot more popular than Distill Web Monitor. While we know about 97 links to Scrapy, we've tracked only 2 mentions of Distill Web Monitor. 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.

Distill Web Monitor mentions (2)

  • looking for a specific software
    I haven't used any in recent years so I'm not up to speed with the pros/cons of each, but PageProbe, SiteDelta Watch, and Distill Web Monitor are a few to try. Source: about 3 years ago
  • App monitoring and reading parts of the screen
    I’ve had pretty good luck with the distill web monitor https://distill.io/apps/web-monitor. Source: about 4 years ago

Scrapy mentions (97)

  • Current problems and mistakes of web scraping in Python and tricks to solve them!
    One might ask, what about Scrapy? I'll be honest: I don't really keep up with their updates. But I haven't heard about Zyte doing anything to bypass TLS fingerprinting. So out of the box Scrapy will also be blocked, but nothing is stopping you from using curl_cffi in your Scrapy Spider. - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
  • Automate Spider Creation in Scrapy with Jinja2 and JSON
    Install scrapy (Offical website) either using pip or conda (Follow for detailed instructions):. - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
  • Analyzing Svenskalag Data using DBT and DuckDB
    Using Scrapy I fetched the data needed (activities and attendance). Scrapy handled authentication using a form request in a very simple way:. - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago
  • Scrapy Vs. Crawlee
    Scrapy is an open-source Python-based web scraping framework that extracts data from websites. With Scrapy, you create spiders, which are autonomous scripts to download and process web content. The limitation of Scrapy is that it does not work very well with JavaScript rendered websites, as it was designed for static HTML pages. We will do a comparison later in the article about this. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • What is SERP? Meaning, Use Cases and Approaches
    While there is no specific library for SERP, there are some web scraping libraries that can do the Google Search Page Ranking. One of them which is quite famous is Scrapy - It is a fast high-level web crawling and web scraping framework, used to crawl websites and extract structured data from their pages. It offers rich developer community support and has been used by more than 50+ projects. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Distill Web Monitor and Scrapy, you can also consider the following products

Visualping - Visualping is the easiest to use website checker, webpage change monitoring, website change detector and website change alert software of the web. Read more about Visualping.

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

Wachete - Track web page changes and get notified. Free Sign-up. Have all data in one place

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

WebSite-Watcher - WebSite-Watcher detects website updates and highlights all changes in the text. WebSite-Watcher monitors web pages, password protected pages, disucssion forums and much more.

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

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