Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Scrapy VS Extractor API

Compare Scrapy VS Extractor API and see what are their differences

Scrapy logo Scrapy

Scrapy | A Fast and Powerful Scraping and Web Crawling Framework

Extractor API logo Extractor API

Extract clean text from thousands of articles with a simple API request or use our visual web tool - we'll handle IP rotation, retries and everything else. Features include news search, translation, and ML-powered text extraction.
  • Scrapy Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-11
  • Extractor API Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-11

Features

IP Rotation & JS Rendering

We automatically apply IP rotation and retries to every request (Free Plan included), and all our paid plans allow you to render JavaScript before extraction.

Search Country News

Free and paid plans can search the world's news with our News Search endpoint. Every request returns up to 100 news items, including metadata. Collect the URLs - then extract clean text with our Extractor endpoint.

Clean Text & Metadata

Extract clean text, HTML, image and video links, authors, title, publication date, html, and raw text. Choose only the fields you need.

API Not Required

You can extract data from up to 1,000 URLs at a time using our online visual extractor - not just the API. The visual extractor is included in all plans.

Store Your Results

Both the API and the visual extractor allow you to store your results in Jobs. Assign your target URLs a job name, then see their progress online or programmatically. Once the job is done, you can retrieve the results any time.

Translate Extracted Text

All paid accounts are able to translate to and from 55 languages. Swahili to English, Vietnamese to French, or anything you want - extract clean text and translate it with a single API call.

Scrapy

Website
scrapy.org
Pricing URL
-
$ Details
Platforms
-
Release Date
-

Extractor API

$ Details
freemium
Platforms
Windows Browser Web Android iOS Mac OSX Google Chrome Linux Firefox Cross Platform REST API Safari JavaScript iPhone Chrome OS Internet Explorer Windows Phone Python Node JS Ruby Java C PHP .Net Go Swift C++ Docker ReactJS TypeScript
Release Date
2020 March

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.

Extractor API features and specs

  • Robust API
    We handle IP rotation, retries and JavaScript rendering - you get clean text.
  • News Search
    Search the world's news with a single API call - up to 100 results per request.
  • Extract Everything
    Extract clean text, translate it into 50+ languages and get tons of metadata.
  • Visual Extraction
    Don't want to use the API? Use our visual online tool to paste or upload URLs!
  • Persistent Jobs
    Both our API and online tool allow you to save extracted text to your Jobs page.
  • Quick Start
    Check out the Getting Started guide for a quick overview of the API and the FAQ for more info.

Scrapy videos

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

Extractor API videos

Extractor API - Visual Extractor Demo

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Scrapy and Extractor API)
Web Scraping
100 100%
0% 0
Web Scraping API
0 0%
100% 100
Data Extraction
98 98%
2% 2
Enterprise Search
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 Scrapy and Extractor API

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.

Extractor API Reviews

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

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Scrapy seems to be a lot more popular than Extractor API. While we know about 97 links to Scrapy, we've tracked only 3 mentions of Extractor API. 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.

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 / 9 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 / 11 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
View more

Extractor API mentions (3)

  • webscraping for sentiment analysis
    Take a look at our webscraping API - should be able to do what you need it to do. https://extractorapi.com/. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Using ChatGPT to build a database from web scraping?
    If you want to make it easier, we built a text extraction tool that can fit a number of use cases https://extractorapi.com/ people are using it instead of GPT for the scraping and then in certain cases feeding the data that comes from here to some broader app/use case. Just another route! Source: about 2 years ago
  • Text Extraction Tool for Training your ChatGPT app
    I'm looking for input on our tool as a pipeline for text data into your own ChatGPT use case. We know you can use ChatGPT API to do the same task, but we've found that to be costly and time-consuming for the text extraction/scraping portion. We've built a cost-effective and quick tool, Extractor API, for that use case. Would love to see what others are using outside of just relying on ChatGPT for text extraction. Source: about 2 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Scrapy and Extractor API, you can also consider the following products

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

Schema API - Extract structured content from the semantic web

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

Twinword Finder - Stop wasting time READING EVERYTHING. Read what you want and skip the rest. A Chrome browser extension that highlights related sections on any web page.

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

SummarizeBot API - Integrate our premium text and image analysis APIs into applications that may require artificial intelligence features. Start for free, no payment or credit card information required!