A good web data extraction/screen scraper program?

Question

I need to capture product data from a site on a regular basis and wondered if any one knows of a good software program? I've trialed Mozenda but its a monthly subscription and pricey in the long term. Obviously something thats free would be best but I don't mind paying either. Just need a decent program thats reliable and doesn't require much programming knowledge.

Answer 1

I really like iMacros. You can give it a test drive to see if it meets your needs with the totally free Firefox extension (there's also IE versions), but there are also more full featured application and "server" versions that have more features and ability to do thing in an unattended manner.

Answer 2

I've experimented with Screen-Scraper and found it easy to use. The application comes in multiple versions: basic (which is free), professional, and enterprise. Also, multiple platforms are supported.

Answer 3

You can try ScraperWiki.com if you know python.

Answer 4

hire a programmer to do it so that there is only a one off cost. I see jobs like that all the time on freelancing websites like Elance and Odesk.

Answer 5

Try Automation Anywhere. I think it can be complete package for web data extraction or screen scraping, the way you are looking for :)

Answer 6

Here are some other alternatives to consider:

1. License the data from the provider. Call em up and ask 'em.

2. Use Amazon Mechanical Turk to get humans to copy and paste and format it for ya. They are cheap.

3. For automation, it depends on how complicated the HTML is and how often it changes. You could use Excel's Web Data Import if it's really simple.

Answer 7

You can use irobot from IRobotSoft, which is totally free, and provides more functionalityies than other paid software. Watch demos here http://irobotsoft.com/help/ for how simple it is.

Questions on their forum were answered very quickly.