Table of Contents
If you are one of the competitors mentioned in the comparison and you see a typo, or we described your API wrong, please, contact us as soon as possible. We want to provide the most objective comparison to choose the best web crawler API.
The choice of a crawler API is not to be taken lightly. It's a vital base service for AI chatbots, SEO tools, and other applications. In this context, a web crawler API is one of the fundamental building blocks of all businesses. A wrong choice can have
We searched for Web crawler API y, and here is the list with basic descriptions, features and prices.
There are the best web crawler APIs:
Oxylab
URL: https://developers.oxylabs.io/scraper-apis/web-crawler
On the date of this article, Oxylab is the top result on Google. Oxylab is one of the largest scraping providers, offering various services, including scraping solutions, residential proxies, and crawled datasets. While web crawling is relatively new and not a central feature for them, they do offer basic crawling capabilities:
Features
Read more about Oxylab web crawler in Oxylab web crawler documentation.
- javascript render
- filtering by the max depth and regular expressions
- custom user agent type
- custom geolocation
- output format: raw html or parsed json
- upload to custom storage, like S3
- scheduling
Pricing
Pricing is subscription-based:
- from 2.8$ per 1k pages in plan for 49$/month.
- to 1.9$ per 1k pages in plan for 2000$/month.
Crawlbase
URL: https://crawlbase.com/crawling-api-avoid-captchas-blocks
Significant scraping and crawling provider. The core feature is data scraping. Powerful temples for all big websites, like Amazon, eBay, etc., allow the extraction of formatted data. Choosing to crawl Crawlbase provides a custom setup crawler running on a dedicated virtual machine.
Features
- javascript rendering
- scraping params: custom user agent
- custom javascript execution
- custom request headers
- custom request cookies
- custom geolocation
- page screenshot (if you want to take a screenshot of any page, use the best screenshot API for this: https://screenshotone.com)
- upload to Crawlbase cloud storage
- output format: raw html or parsed json
- variety of scrapers to extract and format data from crawled pages
Pricing
For pricing Crawlbase use pay-as-you-go model:
- from 6$/1k pages (with javascript rendering)
- to 0.08$/1k pages if you want to crawl more than 1B pages per month
Usescraper
This is a good project made by indiehacker. It has a scraping and crawling API and the possibility of using a no-code UI to crawl the full website.
Features
- Comprehensive UI to manage crawling and scraping
- javascript rendering
- multi-site crawling per job
- webhook update
- exclude page by list
- exclude elements from the page by the css selector
- output formats: raw html, text, markdown
- crawl data expiration
- page limit per job
- skip pages by content size
- crawl pages from the sitemap
- block resources
- include linked files (e.g. PDFs, images)
Pricing
Simple pay-as-you-go pricing:
- 1$ per 1k pages
Apify
URL: https://apify.com/
Apify is a platform that allows the building and deploying custom scrapers and crawlers. Although this is not a classical API, you can still have a programmatic interface for your crawlers hosted there. Apify is the best option if you are familiar with coding and want to build a highly custom crawler by your own. To be able to crawl a website, you have to build your own crawler code or use one of the ready templates and deploy it.
Features
- code your own crawler
- all essential pieces available on the platform allows you to build your own crawler using coding
Pricing
- per resources, used by a virtual machine where your crawler is hosted
WebcrawlerAPI
URL: https://webcrawlerapi.com/
Although it is possible to scrape the data, Wecrawling API aims at crawling content mainly. Webcrawler API is a new solution on the market and is actively adding new features. You can even request any feature yourself.
Features
- comprehensive UI to manage jobs
- javascript rendering
- page limit per job
- white and black lists using regular expressions
- webhook update
- output format: raw html
- clean content (remove all html tags and useless data from content)
- build in residential proxies
Pricing
Pricing is simple pay-as-you-go:
- 2$ per 1k pages
Conclusion
We tried to do the most impartial and independent analysis. Please get in touch with us if there is any incorrect information.
We are are working hard on Wecrawler API and want to help you solve your problem the the fastest way. If you're going to use Webcrawler API and missing some feature, don't hesitate to contact us via email: [email protected].