Scrapping

54 Free Open-source Web Spiders, Crawlers and Scrapping Solutions for Data Collection

Hazem Abbas

Sep 7, 2023 — 28 min read

Photo by RetroSupply / Unsplash

Web crawling, scraping, and spiders are all related to the process of extracting data from websites.

Web crawling is the process of automatically gathering data from the internet, usually with the goal of building a database of information. This is often done by searching for links within web pages, and following those links to other pages.

Web scraping is similar, but focuses on extracting specific data from websites, rather than gathering data broadly. This can be done manually or with the use of specialized software.

Spiders are a type of software used for web crawling and web scraping. They are designed to automate the process of following links and extracting data from websites.

The best use-cases for web crawling, scraping, and spiders include:

Market research: gathering data on competitors, pricing, and industry trends.
Lead generation: finding potential customers and their contact information.
SEO: analyzing website structure and content to optimize search engine rankings.
Content aggregation: gathering data from multiple sources to create a database or comparison tool.

The target audience for web crawling, scraping, and spiders varies depending on the specific use-case. However, it is typically used by businesses, marketers, and researchers who are looking to gather and analyze large amounts of data from the internet.

1- Crawlab

Crawlab is a distributed web crawler management platform is based on Golang and supports a wide range of languages, including Python, Node.js, Go, Java, and PHP. It also has the flexibility to work with various web crawler frameworks, such as Scrapy, Puppeteer, and Selenium.

It can be installed using Docker and Docker-compose in mins.

2- Gerapy

Gerapy is a self-hosted Distributed Crawler Management Framework Based on Scrapy, Scrapyd, Scrapyd-Client, Scrapyd-API, Django and Vue.js. It is available to install using Docker or from source.

Gerapy comes with developer-friendly documentation that allows developers to quickly start coding their scraping and crawling scenarios.

3- Serritor (Java)

Serritor is the perfect choice for anyone looking for an open-source web crawler framework. Built upon Selenium using Java, it provides the ability to crawl dynamic web pages that require JavaScript to render data.

4- WBot

WBot is a configurable, thread-safe web crawler, provides a minimal interface for crawling and downloading web pages.

Features

Clean minimal API.
Configurable: MaxDepth, MaxBodySize, Rate Limit, Parrallelism, User Agent & Proxy rotation.
Memory-efficient, thread-safe.
Provides built-in interface: Fetcher, Store, Queue & a Logger.

5- Abot

Abot is a C# web crawler framework that handles tasks like multithreading, http requests, and link parsing. It's fast and flexible, and supports custom implementations of core interfaces. Abot Nuget package has high compatibility with many .net framework/core implementations, with version >= 2.0 targeting Dotnet Standard 2.0 and version < 2.0 targeting .NET version 4.0.

Features

Open Source (Free for commercial and personal use)
It's fast, really fast!!
Easily customizable (Pluggable architecture allows you to decide what gets crawled and how)
Heavily unit tested (High code coverage)
Very lightweight (not over engineered)
No out of process dependencies (no databases, no installed services, etc...)

6- ACHE Focused Crawler

ACHE is a focused web crawler. It collects web pages that satisfy some specific criteria, e.g., pages that belong to a given domain or that contain a user-specified pattern.

ACHE differs from generic crawlers in that it uses page classifiers to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant pages in a given domain. A page classifier can be as simple as a regular expression that matches every page containing a specific word or as complex as a machine-learning based classification model.

Moreover, ACHE can automatically learn how to prioritize links to efficiently locate relevant content while avoiding the retrieval of irrelevant content.

ACHE supports many features, such as:

Regular crawling of a fixed list of websites
Discovery and crawling of new relevant websites through automatic link prioritization
Configuration of different types of pages classifiers (machine-learning, regex, etc)
Continuous re-crawling of sitemaps to discover new pages
Indexing of crawled pages using Elasticsearch
Web interface for searching crawled pages in real-time
REST API and web-based user interface for crawler monitoring
Crawling of hidden services using TOR proxies

7- crawlframej

A simple framework for a focused web-crawler in Java.

The framework has been successfully used to build a focused web-crawler for a major blogging site.

8- Crawlee

Crawlee covers your crawling and scraping end-to-end and helps you build reliable scrapers. Fast.

Your crawlers will appear human-like and fly under the radar of modern bot protections even with the default configuration. Crawlee gives you the tools to crawl the web for links, scrape data, and store it to disk or cloud while staying configurable to suit your project's needs.

Features

Single interface for HTTP and headless browser crawling
Persistent queue for URLs to crawl (breadth & depth first)
Pluggable storage of both tabular data and files
Automatic scaling with available system resources
Integrated proxy rotation and session management
Lifecycles customizable with hooks
CLI to bootstrap your projects
Configurable routing, error handling and retries
Dockerfiles ready to deploy
Written in TypeScript with generics

HTTP Crawling

Zero config HTTP2 support, even for proxies
Automatic generation of browser-like headers
Replication of browser TLS fingerprints
Integrated fast HTML parsers. Cheerio and JSDOM
Yes, you can scrape JSON APIs as well

Real Browser Crawling

JavaScript rendering and screenshots
Headless and headful support
Zero-config generation of human-like fingerprints
Automatic browser management
Use Playwright and Puppeteer with the same interface
Chrome, Firefox, Webkit and many others

9- Apache Nutch (Java)

Apache Nutch is an extensible and scalable web crawler.

10- Spidr (Ruby)

Spidr is a Ruby web spidering library that is capable of spidering a single site, multiple domains, specified links, or infinitely. Spidr's design prioritizes speed and ease of use.

Features:

Follows: a, iframe, frame, cookies protected links
Meta refresh direct support
HTTP basic auth protected links
Black-list or white-list URLs based upon:URL scheme, Host name, Port number, Full link, URL extension, Optional /robots.txt support.
HTTPS support
Custom proxy settings

11- GOPA

GOPA, is an open-source web Spider Written in Go. Its goals are focused on:

Light weight, low footprint, memory requirement should < 100MB
Easy to deploy, no runtime or dependency required
Easy to use, no programming or scripts ability needed, out of box features

12- ant

The Go package includes functions that can scan data from the page into your structs or slice of structs, this allows you to reduce the noise and complexity in your source-code.

13- Scrapy (Python)

Scrapy is a fast high-level web crawling and web scraping framework, used to crawl websites and extract structured data from their pages. It can be used for a wide range of purposes, from data mining to monitoring and automated testing.

14- Creeper

This is a web crawler and scraper built in Python 3.9. It works with HTTP(S) and FTP(S) links and also allows you to scrape for emails and phone numbers if desired.

15- Python Web Crawler

This Python script can be used as a corresponding web crawler from a specific URL. This browser monitors its features while navigating on the given URL and keeps detailed logs for each URL visited.

Features

Searches numerous HTML from a URL.
Finds links in the explored HTML content and adds URLs to visit them.
You can set the maximum depth level.
Keeps a list of visited URLs and does not revisit the same URL.
There are appropriate error message and exception handling elements for error handling.
Uses color logging.

16- Colly

Colly is a scraping framework for Gophers that provides a clean interface for writing crawlers, scrapers, and spiders. It allows for easy extraction of structured data from websites, which can be used for data mining, processing, or archiving.

Features

Clean API
Fast (>1k request/sec on a single core)
Manages request delays and maximum concurrency per domain
Automatic cookie and session handling
Sync/async/parallel scraping
Caching
Automatic encoding of non-unicode responses
Robots.txt support
Distributed scraping
Configuration via environment variables
Extensions

17- pyspider

pyspider is a Robust Python Spider (Web Crawler) System.

Its features include:

Powerful WebUI with script editor, task monitor, project manager, and result viewer
Database backend options include: MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, SQLite, and Elasticsearch; PostgreSQL with SQLAlchemy
Message queue options include: RabbitMQ, Redis, and Kombu
Advanced task management features such as task priority, retry, periodical, recrawl by age, etc.
Distributed architecture, with support for Crawl Javascript pages and Python 2.{6,7}, 3.{3,4,5,6}

18- Katana

Katana is a powerful and versatile tool used for crawling and spidering. Its state-of-the-art framework is written entirely in Go, providing users with a seamless and efficient experience.

This tool is perfect for those looking to enhance their web scraping capabilities and gain valuable insight into their target websites. With Katana, you can easily customize the tool to fit your specific needs, allowing for a more personalized and effective approach to your web scraping endeavors.

Whether you are a seasoned professional or a beginner, Katana is an excellent choice for anyone looking to take their web scraping to the next level.

Features

Fast And fully configurable web crawling
Standard and Headless mode support
JavaScript parsing / crawling
Customizable automatic form filling
Scope control - Preconfigured field / Regex
Customizable output - Preconfigured fields
INPUT - STDIN, URL and LIST
OUTPUT - STDOUT, FILE and JSON

19- Hakrawler (Go)

Hakrawler is a fast Golang web crawler that gathers URLs and JavaScript file locations. It is a simple implementation of the awesome Gocolly library.

20- Scrapyteer (Browser + Node.js)

Scrapyteer is a Node.js web scraping tool that uses Puppeteer to scrape both plain HTML pages and JavaScript-generated content, including SPAs. It offers a small set of functions to define a crawling workflow and output data shape.

21- Kankra (Python)

Kankra is an open-source free Website Spider/Crawler, written in Python 3.0.

Kankra features include:

Crawls a website for hrefs, js & img files
Detects links that use a full URL and those without
-> e.g <a href="https://www.ssllabs.com/index.html" VS <a href="/projects/index.html
Adjusts the results for a useful output
Removes duplicates
Automatic out of Scope checking
Configurable:

22- DirFinder

The DirFinder tool is user for bruteforce directory with dedicated Wordlist is very simple user-friendly to use. It is written in Python.

Features

Multi-threading on demand
Supports php, asp and html extensions
Four different types of wordlist
Checks for potential EAR vulnerabilites
user-friendly

23- Bose Framework

✨ Bose is a a feature-rich Python framework for Web Scraping and Bot Development. 🤖

24- Web Crawler (Jupyter Notebook)

This is a web crawling program which can connect a specific website and crawl the main content (data) of that website.

Once you know the main content of the website, it is good to know the type of website and categorize it.

Therefore, an algorithm is proposed which crawls a specific website using this program and determines the similarity between two websites according to the data contained in the website.

25- AutoScraper

AutoScraper is an excellent tool for Python developers looking to extract specific data from web pages. With its Smart, Automatic, Fast, and Lightweight features, it can easily retrieve URLs or HTML content and extract a wide range of data types, including text, URLs, and any HTML tag value from a page.

In addition to its web scraping capabilities, AutoScraper can learn the scraping rules and return similar elements, allowing developers to use the learned object with new URLs to extract similar content or exact elements from those pages. With its powerful capabilities and ease of use, AutoScraper is an essential tool for anyone looking to extract valuable information from the web.

26- Ferret

Ferret is a web scraping system that simplifies data extraction from the web for various purposes, including UI testing, machine learning, and analytics. It uses a declarative language to abstract away technical details and is portable, extensible, and fast.
Features

Declarative language
Support of both static and dynamic web pages
Embeddable
Extensible

27- DotnetSpider

DotnetSpider, is a .NET Standard web crawling library. It is a lightweight, efficient, and fast high-level web crawling & scraping framework.

28- crawlergo

Crawlergo is a browser crawler that uses Chrome headless mode for URL collection, automatically filling and submitting forms and collecting as many entries as possible. It includes a URL de-duplication module and maintains fast parsing and crawling speed for large websites to get high-quality collection of request results.

Features

chrome browser environment rendering
Intelligent form filling, automated submission
Full DOM event collection with automated triggering
Smart URL de-duplication to remove most duplicate requests
Intelligent analysis of web pages and collection of URLs, including javascript file content, page comments, robots.txt files and automatic Fuzz of common paths
Support Host binding, automatically fix and add Referer
Support browser request proxy
Support pushing the results to passive web vulnerability scanners

29- Grab Framework Project

Grab is a free open-source Python-based library for website scrapping.

30- Geziyor

Geziyor is a blazing fast web crawling and web scraping framework. It can be used to crawl websites and extract structured data from them. Geziyor is useful for a wide range of purposes such as data mining, monitoring and automated testing.

Features

JS Rendering
5.000+ Requests/Sec
Caching (Memory/Disk/LevelDB)
Automatic Data Exporting (JSON, CSV, or custom)
Metrics (Prometheus, Expvar, or custom)
Limit Concurrency (Global/Per Domain)
Request Delays (Constant/Randomized)
Cookies, Middlewares, robots.txt
Automatic response decoding to UTF-8
Proxy management (Single, Round-Robin, Custom)

31- FEAPDER (Python)

feapder is an easy to use, powerful crawler framework

32- Trafilatura

Trafilatura is a Python package and command-line tool for web crawling, downloads, scraping, and extraction of main texts, metadata, and comments. It aims to eliminate noise caused by recurring elements and includes author and date information. It is useful for quantitative research in corpus linguistics, natural language processing, and computational social science, among others.

Features

Web crawling
Text discovery
Sitemap support
Seamless and parallel processing, online and offline
Robust and efficient extraction
Output formats: Text, CSV, JSON, XML
Optional add-ons.
Trafilatura is distributed under the GNU General Public License v3.0.

33- Infinity Crawler

Infinity Crawler is a simple but powerful web crawler library for .NET.

The crawler is built around fast but "polite" crawling of website. This is accomplished through a number of settings that allow adjustments of delays and throttles.

You can control:

Number of simulatenous requests
The delay between requests starting (Note: If a crawl-delay is defined for the User-agent, that will be the minimum)
Artificial "jitter" in request delays (requests seem less "robotic")
Timeout for a request before throttling will apply for new requests
Throttling request backoff: The amount of time added to the delay to throttle requests (this is cumulative)
Minimum number of requests under the throttle timeout before the throttle is gradually removed

Features:

Obeys robots.txt (crawl delay & allow/disallow)
Obeys in-page robots rules (X-Robots-Tag header and <meta name="robots" /> tag)
Uses sitemap.xml to seed the initial crawl of the site
Built around a parallel task async/await system
Swappable request and content processors, allowing greater customisation
Auto-throttling (see below)

34- SpiderX

This is a simple web-crawler development framework based on .Net Core.

35- Onion-Crawler

C# based Tor/Onion Web crawler. There might be some errors/bugs so, feel free to contribute and mess with my code.

36- Webcrawler

Web Crawler , that crawls all the inner links and the process goes on till no link is left and ignoring repeatedly crawled links

Open Ipython Console and run the below command to see the extracted URL’s: python sitemapcrawl.py.

37- GoTor

This repository contains an HTTP REST API and a command-line program designed for efficient data gathering and analysis through web crawling using the TOR network. While the program is primarily designed to work seamlessly with TorBot, the API and CLI can also operate independently.

38- Spidey

Spidey is a multi threaded web crawler library that is generic enough to allow different engines to be swapped in.

39- Mimo Crawler (JavaScript)

Mimo is a web crawler that uses non-headless Firefox and js injection to crawl webpages. It uses websockets to communicate between a non-headless browser and the client, allowing for interaction and crawling of webpages by evaluating javascript code into the page's context.

Features

Simple Client API
Interactive crawling
Extremely fast compared to similar tools.
Fully operated by your javascript code
Web spidering

40- WebReaper

WebReaper is a declarative high performance web scraper, crawler and parser in C#. Designed as simple, extensible and scalable web scraping solution. Easily crawl any web site and parse the data, save structed result to a file, DB, or pretty much to anywhere you want.

41- Qaahl

Qaahl a simple webcrawler that can generate a graphical view of the crawled path.

42- Web Wanderer (Python)

Web Wanderer is a Python-based web crawler that uses concurrent.futures. ThreadPoolExecutor and Playwright to crawl and download web pages. It is designed to handle dynamically rendered websites and can extract content from modern web applications.

43- Scrapio

Asyncio web scraping framework. The project aims to make easy to write a high performance crawlers with little knowledge of asyncio, while giving enough flexibility so that users can customise behaviour of their scrapers. It also supports Uvloop, and can be used in conjunction with custom clients allowing for browser based rendering.

44- CobWeb

This is a project carried out for the collection of climatic data, as well as data on bugs and diseases that affect crops in agriculture.

45- Spring Boot Web Crawler and Search Engine

This project provides a REST API that allows users to submit URLs for crawling. The app internally uses RabbitMQ to publish the URLs, and then listens back to fetch the contents of the URLs using Jsoup.

The app also scrapes links and indexes the content using Apache Lucene. Finally, the app recursively publishes the links to RabbitMQ.

46- uSearch (Go)

uSearch is an open-source website crawler, indexer and text search engine.

47- Dolors

Dolors is a Java-based web scraper with built in web crawler that allows you to index a website and its contents including media and text related information and store the output in SQL database or just export the data into a text file for quick processing.

48- Webash

Webash serves as a scanning tool for web-based applications, primarily utilized in bug bounty programs and penetration testing. Its framework-like design allows effortless integration of vulnerability detection scripts.

49- CryCrawler

CryCrawler is a portable cross-platform web crawler. Used to crawl websites and download files that match specified criteria.

Features

Portable - Single executable file you can run anywhere without any extra requirements
Cross-platform - Works on Windows/Linux/OSX and other platforms supported by NET Core
Multi-threaded - Single crawler can use as many threads as specified by the user for crawling.
Distributed - Connect multiple crawlers to a host; or connect multiple hosts to a master host. (using SSL)
Extensible - Extend CryCrawler's functionality by using plugins/extensions.
Web GUI - Check status, change configuration, start/stop program, all through your browser - remotely.
Breadth/Depth-first crawling - Two different modes for crawling websites (FIFO or LIFO for storing URLs)
Robots Exclusion Standard - Option for crawler to respect or ignore 'robots.txt' provided by websites
Custom User-Agent - User can provide a custom user-agent for crawler to use when getting websites.
File Critera Configuration - Decide which files to download based on extension, media type, file size, filename or URL.
Domain Whitelist/Blacklist - Force crawler to stay only on certain domains or simply blaclist domains you don't need.
Duplicate file detection - Files with same names are compared using MD5 checksums to ensure no duplicates.
Persistent - CryCrawler will keep retrying to crawl failed URLs until they are crawled (up to a certain time limit)

50- Catch

Catch is a Web crawler with built in parsers using latest Python technologies.

51- WebCrawler

A JavaScript web-based crawler that works well with website internal links.

52- Google Parser

Google parser is a lightweight yet powerful HTTP client based Google Search Result scraper/parser with the purpose of sending browser-like requests out of the box. This is very essential in the web scraping industry to blend in with the website traffic.

Features:

Proxy support
Custom headers support

53- Senginta.js Search Engine Scrapper

Senginta is a versatile search engine scraper that can extract results from any search engine and convert them to JSON. Currently, it supports Google Product Search Engine and Baidu Search Engine, but the developer welcomes contributions to support other search engines.

54- SERPMaster

SERPMaster is a SERP scraping tool that utilizes multiple Google APIs to acquire large volumes of data from Google Search Result Pages, including rich results for both paid and organic search data.SERPMaster is a scraping tool that delivers real-time data from Google Search Engine Result Pages.

Features

100% success rate
Device and browser-specific requests
City, country, or coordinate-level data
Data in CSV, JSON, and HTML
CAPTHAs, retries, proxy management are taken care of
JavaScript rendering
Python, JavaScript, PHP languages

Scrapping data engineering structured data data organizer Data Mining List web development web developer web developers

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1- Crawlab

2- Gerapy

3- Serritor (Java)

4- WBot

5- Abot

6- ACHE Focused Crawler

7- crawlframej

8- Crawlee

9- Apache Nutch (Java)

10- Spidr (Ruby)

11- GOPA

12- ant

13- Scrapy (Python)

14- Creeper

15- Python Web Crawler

16- Colly

17- pyspider

18- Katana

19- Hakrawler (Go)

20- Scrapyteer (Browser + Node.js)

21- Kankra (Python)

22- DirFinder

23- Bose Framework

24- Web Crawler (Jupyter Notebook)

25- AutoScraper

26- Ferret

27- DotnetSpider

28- crawlergo

29- Grab Framework Project

30- Geziyor

31- FEAPDER (Python)

32- Trafilatura

33- Infinity Crawler

34- SpiderX

35- Onion-Crawler

36- Webcrawler

37- GoTor

38- Spidey

39- Mimo Crawler (JavaScript)

40- WebReaper

41- Qaahl

42- Web Wanderer (Python)

43- Scrapio

44- CobWeb

45- Spring Boot Web Crawler and Search Engine

46- uSearch (Go)

47- Dolors

48- Webash

49- CryCrawler

50- Catch

51- WebCrawler

52- Google Parser

53- Senginta.js Search Engine Scrapper

54- SERPMaster

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