Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Simple Scraper VS ScrapingBee

Compare Simple Scraper VS ScrapingBee and see what are their differences

Simple Scraper logo Simple Scraper

Extract data from any website in seconds — download instantly, scrape in the cloud, or create an API.

ScrapingBee logo ScrapingBee

ScrapingBee is a Web Scraping API that handles proxies and Headless browser for you, so you can focus on extracting the data you want, and nothing else.
  • 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.

  • ScrapingBee Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-01-12

Web Scraping is hard, scraping at scale can be very challenging.

You have to handle:

  • Javascript rendering 💻
  • Chrome headless 🛠
  • Captcha 🤖
  • Proxy 🕵️‍♀️

ScrapingBee is a simple API that does all the above for you, and much more.

Simple Scraper

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

ScrapingBee

$ Details
freemium $49.0 / Monthly (Freelance / 10,000 searches / 100,000 credits)
Platforms
REST API
Release Date
2019 July

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.

ScrapingBee features and specs

  • Easy to Use
    ScrapingBee provides a simple API that allows developers to scrape web pages without worrying about handling proxies or web browser rendering.
  • JavaScript Rendering
    With built-in JavaScript rendering, ScrapingBee can handle complex web pages that rely heavily on JavaScript for content display, making it suitable for scraping modern websites.
  • Proxy Management
    ScrapingBee automatically manages proxies, meaning developers don't have to deal with proxy rotation, blacklisting, or bans.
  • Rate Limiting Control
    The service offers control over rate limits, making it possible to scrape at a custom speed that suits your needs and prevents being blocked by target websites.
  • Custom Headers Support
    ScrapingBee allows the use of custom headers, enabling users to mimic different browsers or add specific headers required by the target site.
  • Geolocation
    It provides geolocation-based scraping, which is useful for accessing content that is region-restricted.

Possible disadvantages of ScrapingBee

  • Cost
    ScrapingBee is a paid service, and costs can add up depending on the volume and complexity of your scraping needs.
  • Rate Limits
    Even though it offers control over rate limits, there are still predefined limits depending on your plan, which might not suit very high-volume scraping needs.
  • Dependency on External Service
    Relying on an external service means that you are dependent on ScrapingBee's uptime and performance, which may affect your operations if the service faces downtime.
  • Data Privacy
    Using a third-party service for web scraping means sharing your scraping activities with ScrapingBee, which could raise data privacy concerns.
  • Limited Customization
    While ScrapingBee handles many aspects of web scraping for you, it may not offer the level of customization that a self-built scraping solution could provide.

Simple Scraper videos

Super Simple Scraper Review

More videos:

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

ScrapingBee videos

No ScrapingBee videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Simple Scraper and ScrapingBee)
Web Scraping
33 33%
67% 67
Data Extraction
28 28%
72% 72
API Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Web Scraping API
16 16%
84% 84

User comments

Share your experience with using Simple Scraper and ScrapingBee. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Simple Scraper should be more popular than ScrapingBee. It has been mentiond 20 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.

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 / about 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
View more

ScrapingBee mentions (3)

  • Self-hosted, simple web browser service – send URL, get screenshots
    If you’re worried about the security risks, edge cases, maintenance pain and scaling challenges of self hosting there are various solid hosted alternatives: - https://browserless.io - low level browser control - https://scrapingbee.com - scraping specialists - https://urlbox.com - screenshot specialists* They’re all profitable and have been around for years so you can depend on the businesses and the tech. *... - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • Are there any APIs that maintain a database of subscriptions?
    If you really just need the data you can use something like https://scrapingbee.com to scrape the info from the various price pages to make sure your info is always up to date. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Our bootstrapped SaaS just turned 3 and reached $1.5m ARR: the lessons learned.
    Well done! And posting here was a great idea. Not sure I would have found scrapingbee.com otherwise. We will probably become a customer. Signed up for the trial account. Source: almost 3 years ago

What are some alternatives?

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

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

Zyte - We're Zyte (formerly Scrapinghub), the central point of entry for all your web data needs.

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

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

Bright Data - World's largest proxy service with a residential proxy network of 72M IPs worldwide and proxy management interface for zero coding.

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