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10 best data extraction tools

Richard Brown 38 Stories

Thursday July 19, 2018 , 4 min Read

The advantage of data extraction cannot be over-emphasized. Every organization has now woken up to the advantage of data extraction. Data extraction is now required for a growing number of reasons. It is used for tracking prices in markets for comprehensive price comparisons, gathering contact info for prospective customers, a collection of information to draw important conclusion, etc. The list is already endless, and it is still growing.

Unfortunately, companies often find it difficult to employ enough hands for the amount of data gathering that they need. Besides, as much as organizations make conscious efforts to scrape data from numerous sites, they also make efforts to prevent the content of their sites from being copied easily. After all, the competition among businesses is gradually turning into business war where no strategy's barred.

So, most companies usually resort to the use of data extraction tools. The benefits of using data extraction tools are numerous - speed, accuracy, higher productivity, lower cost, and competitive advantage. However, some tools are more effective than others for different data extraction needs. To help you narrow your search, some popular and effective data extraction tools have been outlined below. They are suitable for beginners as well as professionals.

OutWitHub

This is a very popular data extraction tool. It divides web pages into different categories based on their elements. Then it goes from page to page to scrape specified data from source websites. The tool is suitable for gathering images, data tables, email addresses, links, and many more.

Web Scraper

This tool is known for being very easy to use. Its major uniqueness lies in its ability to extract data from external pages so it is suitable for image extraction, contact detail extraction, pricing extraction, scraping of email addresses, and other forms of web data scraping.

Spinn3r

This is more of a service than a tool. It is suitable for spotting and scraping content from blogs all over the internet. It gives users real-time access to every published blog. So, organizations use it to gather data from news platforms, review sites, web blogs, forums, social media, and more.

Fminer

This tool is also very popular. It is mainly a visual web scraping tool. So, you can use it as a macro recorder, and a web data extractor. It works well for document extraction, image extraction, phone number scraping, and gathering of email addresses.

ParseHub

If you have been into web extraction for a while, this name should ring a bell to you. One of the reasons it is popular is that it can be used by virtually anyone. It is suitable for scraping prices, phone numbers, contact information, email addresses and other kinds of documents.

Octaparse

This tool is relatively more powerful than numerous data scraping tools. It scrapes deeper. In addition to the normal data extraction needs, it can be used to extract IP addresses.

Table Capture

This is an extension of the Chrome browser. Apart from being able to extract data from HTML tables, it can also convert scraped data into different formats like CSV and Excel.

Scrappy

This is a mere open source code development framework. Its data extraction ability is relatively higher than that of others because it uses Python. So, it can scrape data from multiple websites at the same time. Unfortunately, that also means that users without programming knowledge cannot use it.

Tabula

This tool is more of a conversion tool than a data extraction tool. It is an application that supports Linux, Windows, and Mac OSX. Organizations use it to convert PDF files into CSV or Excel files. This tool is perfect for data journalism.

Dexi.io

This tool is browser-based, so you don't have to download and install it. What makes it unique is that it can be used to extract data anonymously with various proxy servers.

Conclusion

After going through the details of the data extraction tools, you will understand that some of them are better for certain tasks than others. So, you may need to make use of a combination of tools to achieve optimal results.

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