Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Scrapy VS Simple Scraper

Compare Scrapy VS Simple Scraper and see what are their differences

Scrapy logo Scrapy

Scrapy | A Fast and Powerful Scraping and Web Crawling Framework

Simple Scraper logo Simple Scraper

Extract data from any website in seconds — download instantly, scrape in the cloud, or create an API.
  • Scrapy Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-11
  • 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.

Scrapy

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

Simple Scraper

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

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.

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.

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

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 Scrapy and Simple Scraper)
Web Scraping
81 81%
19% 19
Data Extraction
85 85%
15% 15
Data
100 100%
0% 0
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 Scrapy and Simple Scraper

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.

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, Scrapy should be more popular than Simple Scraper. It has been mentiond 97 times since March 2021. 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 / 12 months 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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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 Scrapy and Simple Scraper, you can also consider the following products

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

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

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

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

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.

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