In-Depth Guide to Top 15 Open Source Web Crawlers in 2024

Survey revealed that 35% of businesses believe big data and analytics are the top business functions impacted by open source implementation. Open source web crawlers enable businesses to extract online data in a real-time manner while leveraging the benefits of open source software such as lower costs and no vendor lock-in.

In this article we explore the top open source web crawlers and how to choose the right one for your business:

What are open source crawlers?

Web crawlers are a type of software that automatically targets online websites and pulls their data in a machine-readable format. Open source web crawlers enable users to:

• modify the code and customize their web crawlers to achieve business goals
• benefit from community support and citizen developers who share development ideas

What are the top open source web crawler tools?

Here’s a list of the top 15 open source web crawlers and the languages they are written in:

How to choose the best open source web crawler?

To choose the right open source web crawler for your business or scientific purposes, make sure to follow best practices:

• Participate in the community: Open source web crawlers usually have a large active community where users share new codes or ways to fix bugs. Businesses can participate in the community to quickly find answers to their problems, and discover robust crawling methods.
• Update open source crawler regularly: Businesses should track open source software updates and deploy them to patch security vulnerabilities and add new features.
• Choose an extensible crawler: It is important to choose an open source web crawler which can cope with new data formats and fetch protocols used to request access to pages. It is also crucial to choose a tool which can be run on the types of devices used in the organization (Mac, Windows machines, etc.)

Businesses who want to benefit from a web crawler but don’t have the programming or maintenance expertise can leverage off-the-shelf web crawlers.

Sponsored:

Bright Data’s Data Collector scrapes public data from targeted websites in real-time and delivers it to users on autopilot in the designated format. The following video demonstrates how bright data can be used to extract website data:

How to program a web crawler in house?

Depending on the frequency and scale of your web crawling needs, you may find programming your own web crawler more productive in the long run. In-house web crawlers will likely need technical maintenance. Therefore, if you do not have technical resources built in your team and will outsource the web crawling effort, using an open source tool or working with web scrapers may be less hassle free, given that you would be dependent on a technical freelancer for the in-house solution as well.

In order to learn the pros and cons of building an in-house web crawler or using an external one, as well as choosing the best programming language for web crawling, check out our guide on web scraping programming.

More on web crawlers & proxies

To explore web crawling in detail, feel free to check our in-depth articles about web crawling use cases in:

• Web Scraping APIs: How-To, Capabilities & Top 10 Tools
• Top 10 Proxy Service Providers of 2023 for Web Scraping
• The Ultimate Guide to Proxy Server Types

If you want to invest in a web scraping solution, feel free to check our data-driven list of web crawlers.

And we can guide you through the process to choose the right web crawler for your business: