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Web Scraping APIs: Comprehensive Guide & Top 9 Tools of 2024

Data extraction is the initial and crucial step to embedding data into business operations and processes. When it comes to collecting data, web scrapers and application programming interfaces (APIs) are the two common solutions. Web scraping APIs allows developers to interact with web pages and scrape required data points. This article examines the top web scraping APIs and the capabilities they enable.

Snapshot comparison of top web scraping APIs

VendorsJavaScript renderingBuilt-in proxyPricing/moPAYG planFree trial
Bright Data$5007-day
Apify$497-day
Oxylabs$4997-day
Smartproxy$503K free requests
Nimble$6007-day
NetNut$12007-day
SOAXN/A$597-day
Zyte$100$5 free for a month
Diffbot$29914-day

We might have missed some scraping APIs with relevant capabilities or our tables become outdated due to new vendors or new capabilities of existing tools. If that is the case, please leave a comment.  

Feature-based showdown: comparing top web scraping APIs

1. Bright Data

Bright Data offers Scraping Browser API and SERP API for data extraction activities. In our analysis, we focus on Scraping Browser. Scraping browser is a GUI browser, or “headfull” browser that is used for scraping tasks. It allows users to extract data from browsers and avoid IP blocks and anti-bot measures.

Features:

  • Offers built-in website unblocking capabilities, such as CAPTCHA solving, browser fingerprinting, cookies and automatic retries.
  • Compatible with Puppeteer, Playwright and Selenium.
  • Provides automated user emulation feature. You can mimic a real user’s interactions, such as clicking on elements, scrolling pages and executing JavaScript.

2. Apify

Apify is a cloud platform that comes with a wide selection of tools designed for large-scale web scraping, automation, and data extraction tasks. It supports integration with various cloud services and web applications, such as Google Sheets, Slack, and GitHub, enhancing its versatility for different projects.

Features:

  • Export data sets into CSV, JSON, Excel, or alternative file formats.
  • The platform includes a set of “actors,” which are specialized cloud-based programs designed to perform a variety of automation tasks, including pre-built scrapers for popular websites like Amazon, eBay, and Instagram.
  • Users can choose to develop custom actors using the Apify Software Development Kit (SDK).

3. Oxylabs

Oxylabs offers web scraper API to extract data from JavaScript-heavy websites. The data collection solution supports headless browser to render JavaScript-based pages.

Features:

4. Smartproxy

Smartproxy’s web scraping API collect real-time data from static and JavaScript heavy web pages. The scraping solution supports city-level targeting with its built-in proxy server. It is a mix of scraping API and a headless web scraper.

Features:

  • Combines a network of 50M+ different proxies and a scraping tool to send and receive requests to the target web page.
  • Automatically rotate proxies at set intervals or after per connection request to the target site.
  • Delivers the data you have scraped in raw HTML.
  • Supports headless scraping. It can execute JavaScript and interact with web pages like a real browser.

5. Nimble

Nimble provides a Web Scraping API featuring integrated rotating residential proxies and unlocker proxy solutions. The Web API is capable of handling batch requests, allowing up to 1,000 URLs in each batch. The Nimble Web API offers three methods for data delivery:

  1. Real-time: Data is collected and instantly returned to the user.
  2. Cloud Storage: Collected data is sent to the user’s chosen cloud storage service.
  3. Push/Pull: Data is stored on Nimble’s servers and can be accessed through a provided URL for download.

Features:

  • Enables users to interact with a webpage, such as clicking, typing, and scrolling, before collecting data. This feature is particularly beneficial for extracting data from e-commerce sites, which often need button clicks to reveal product data.
  • Provides parsing templates that enable users to extract specific data points using CSS selectors. These templates include built-in support for tables, JSON output, and the creation of custom objects.

6. NetNut

NetNut provides a SERP Scraper API designed for scraping data from Google. This API allows users to fetch Google search engine results pages (SERPs), offering customization options to modify requests based on various parameters such as geographic location, pagination, and localization preferences including language and country settings.

Features:

  • Allows for detailed targeting at the city/state level and supports all languages.
  • Provides the gathered SERP data in JSON or HTML format.

7. SOAX

SOAX e-Commerce API allows businesses access and scrape data from Amazon with a simple API call. You can scrape different data points from Amazon search results, product, category, and bestsellers pages. It is compatible with all programming languages.

Features:

  • Handles pagination, you can set a max page parameter for scraping multiple pages.
  • Automatically handles web harvesting challenges such as CAPTCHAs, IP bans, rate limiting.
  • Provides built-in proxy management capabilities.
  • Delivers data in HTML or structured data in JSON format.

8. Zyte

Zyte API allows users to handle JavaScript content. In order to render the target web page, API uses browser automation. It supports request headers, cookies and toggling JavaScript.

Features:

  • Includes automatic proxy rotation to reduce the likelihood of getting detected or banned by the target website.
  • Offers automatic ban detection feature. When a scraper has been banned or detected by the target website, the system automatically detects IP ban.

9. Diffbot

Diffbot’s Extract classifies and scrapes from web sources using computer vision and natural language processing. It is useful for high volume web scraping activities.

Features:

  • Gather content from PDFs and other documents
  • Executes JavaScript pages
  • Supports integration with Excel, Google Sheets, Tableau and Zapier
  • Offers datacenter proxies

What is an API?

An application programming interface (API) is a type of software that connects software applications to each other. API enables two or more computer programs to communicate with each other using requests and responses.

What is a web scraping API?

An API is not a data collection tool; it enables clients to access and exchange data by allowing them to communicate with targeting web servers. However, if the target website supports API technology, you can use API to collect data from it. APIs can be classified into two categories: 

  • Third-party APIs: Third-party API is a type of API located on a third-party server and provided by a third party, such as Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, or Google. Third-party APIs, also called open APIs, are available to use by any developer. While some third-party APIs are free, others may require requesters to register for the API in order to access the API functionality.
  • Internal APIs: Internal APIs, also known as private APIs, are not accessible to third parties. This type of API allows for internal machine communication and is available for use inside an organization. Internal APIs prevent unauthorized third-party access to the internal network and enable internal data transfers without external security threats. However, whether you use internal or external APIs, all APIs can be insecure if you do not take the necessary precautions.

4 Examples of APIs

1. API for Amazon

Amazon provides Product Advertising API to allow users access to Amazon data such as customer/seller reviews and product information. To access the API’s functionality, you should register for the Product Advertising API and have an Amazon Associates account. 

Once you have registered the Product Advertising API, you can send requests to the API using an HTTP client. You can search for a specific item on Amazon by requesting parameters supported by the API, such as keywords, titles, brands, etc. After specifying the search query, the Amazon Product Advertising API will return up to 10 products per search query (see Figure 1).1

Figure 1: Product output obtained from the Amazon product page using an API request.

Source: Amazon 2

2. Google Analytics Data API

Google Analytics Data API v4 is a free API that enables users to display Google Analytics data and access report data on GA4 (Google Analytics 4).3 Using the Google Analytics Data API, you can make requests and collect data in the specified Google Analytics 4 property. Users can generate the following reports using the Google Analytics Reporting API v4: 

  • pivot tables 
  • cohort analysis report 
  • lifetime value (LTV) report

3. Twitter API

Users can extract and analyze Twitter data using the Twitter API. Signing up for a developer account is required to access Twitter data and 900 requests in 15-minute rate limits are applied to limit the frequency of requests to the Twitter API.4 Twitter API allows businesses to access the historical archive of public Twitter data to create baseline benchmarks using historical Twitter data. 

LikeFolio uses social data to assist investors, and institutional trading firms in understanding changes and shifts in consumer demand trends.  The company leveraged the combination of Twitter’s Full-Archive Search and PowerTrack APIs in order to retrieve historical data and Tweets in real time. Using data generated from Twitter, LikeFolio has enabled more than 240% gain in ROKU stock price a year.5 ​​The company generated the chart below by using Twitter APIs to collect information. The chart below compares the stock price in gray to the disparity in consumer mentions of Roku goods and services in green.

Figure 2: The difference between the stock price and consumer demand for the company’s goods and services.

Source: Twitter Developer Platform

4. Instagram API

The Instagram Basic Display API is a free HTTP-based API that allows Instagram businesses and creators to retrieve publicly available data from Instagram, including  user profiles, images, videos and hashtags (see Figure 3).6 However, the data provided is restricted in order to manage the frequency of API requests. For example, you cannot pull more than 30 unique hashtags within a week. Moreover, the API does not support the extraction of hashtags and comments mentioned in stories.7 To use the Instagram API, you must first sign up for a Facebook developer account, have a command-line tool, and have a public website you own. 

Figure 3: An example of obtaining image data from Instagram using API 

Source: Meta

How do web scraping APIs work?

Web APIs can be accessed by client devices such as phones and laptops to access the data. 

Assume a client types a URL into the web browser search box;

  1. The URL is in HTTP format, such as “https://aimultiple.com/“.
  2. The client sends an API request to the target web server to gain access to the needed data.
  3. HTTP API request specifies the search item using the “get” verb. 
  4. The API receives the API request from the client in the form of an HTTP request and returns the requested information for each search request based on the item attributes specified in the “get” request. 
  5. The API will then respond to the client’s specific request, usually in the form of JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) or Extensible Markup Language (XML). 

In a nutshell, the web API generates a data pipeline between the client’s device and the target web server to exchange data using the HTTP protocol. Both request (client) and response (web server) have HTTP headers. HTTP headers provide additional context about the request or response for the client and web server to communicate, such as “Content-Type”, “Content-Location”, “User-Agent”, or “Accept-Ranges” (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: An example of an HTTP request header containing a few pieces of information

Source: MDN 8

Data extraction with APIs: why and when should you use APIs?

There are a few common methods for obtaining data, including pre-packaged datasets, collecting your data, or data from outside sources. Either way, when it comes to data collection, you will need a tool to handle data collection issues. Web scraping tools and APIs enable businesses to collect data from internal and external sources. However, they have some differences regarding technical effort, cost, and data accessibility. 

The technical difficulty of web scrapers varies depending on whether you use in-house or outsourced web scrapers. However, web scraping tools are less flexible than code-based web scraping solutions such as scraping APIs. If you have basic programming knowledge and do not have a budget for pre-built web scraping solutions, you can use APIs for your data collection projects. However, the website from which you want the data must provide the API technology if you want to use APIs for data collection. Otherwise, APIs cannot be an option to collect data. 

APIs, such as the Twitter API, are provided by the website from which you require the data. Because the website’s API provides the data, requesters have authorized access to it. You need not be concerned about being identified as a malicious actor. You must, however, follow the terms and conditions outlined in their API guideline.

Check out our top 7 differences of web Scraping vs API to learn more about the differences between them.

Key features to consider while choosing web scraping API

1. Javascript rendering

Websites collect data and provide tailored content based on visitor activities using various tracking techniques such as browser fingerprinting, cookies, and web beacons. Every time a user visits a website, the content changes. Dynamic websites use client-side scripting to change the content based on users’ input and behaviors, such as resizing images according to clients’ screens or displaying website content based on visitor country. 

For example, when you make a connection request to an API to access the target website’s data, the API receives your request and returns the requested information. Unless you use a headless browser, the target web server and the websites’ API can access information about your device, such as your machine IP address, browser type, geolocation, and preferred language along the way (see Figure 5).

Javascript rendering handles the parsing of the HTML and the CSS documents and images on the requested page and displays the parsed content on the clients’ browser screen. 

To render dynamic website contents, you need to make an HTML request to the target website and invoke the render function to run Javascript code in the background to display the web content on your browser. If you do not want to deal with dynamic web page rendering, you should look for a scraping API that supports javascript rendering. 

Figure 5: Example of a browser fingerprinting

Source: AmIUnique 9

2. Unlimited bandwidth

The maximum rate of data transfer in a computer network is referred to as bandwidth. The amount of data you need to collect should be balanced by your bandwidth rate. Otherwise, the data transferred from the web server to your machine will exceed the maximum data transfer rate, causing the bandwidth to be throttled. Unlimited bandwidth allows businesses to: 

  • Manage data traffic in the network
  • Keep data speed under control and allow for much faster data transmission than a constrained bandwidth rate
  • Receive large amounts of data from other servers without bandwidth throttling

3. CAPTCHA & Anti-Bot Detection

Websites employ various anti-scraping techniques such as Robots.txt, IP blockers, and CAPTCHA to manage the connection request to their websites and protect their content from a specific type of attack such as bots. 

CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) is an anti-scraping method used by web services such as Google to prevent unauthorized users from accessing web data. CAPTCHAs are programmed to be unreadable by machines. Websites use CAPTCHA technologies to distinguish between human and malicious bot activities. There are three types of CAPTCHAs:

To learn how to bypass CAPTCHA challenges, check out “The Ultimate Guide to Avoiding CAPTCHAs in Web Scraping

  1. Text-based: This CAPTCHA type requires users to retype distorted words and numbers they see in a given image (see Figure 6). The provided text is unrecognizable by bots.

Figure 6: An example of text-based CAPTCHA

  1. Image-based: Image-based CAPTCHAs use object detection and target recognition technologies. The user is asked to select specific objects from a set of images the website provides (see Figure 7). 

Figure 7: An example of image-based CAPTCHA 

  1. Audio-based: When you click the audio icon in a distorted image, it will speak the letter in the image for you while making some gibberish noises to prevent bots. 

If the target website from which you need data has its API, you do not need to be concerned about the legality of data scraping and being detected by the website. However, if you use a third-party scraping API solution, you need to either overcome the captcha yourself or outsource the captcha solving to the service provider.

Check out top 7 web scraping best practices to learn more on how to overcome web scraping challenges.

4. Auto Parsing

After data extraction, the collected data may be structured, semi-structured, or unstructured as it is gathered from various data sources. To extract value from collected data, you must parse the extracted data to convert it into a more readable format. 

You can build your parser or leverage outsourced data parsing tools to convert extracted data into the desired data format. However, in-house data parsing tools might have additional overhead costs. Outsourcing the development and maintenance of data parsing infrastructure will allow you to focus on data analysis.

5. Geotargeting

Websites block or restrict access to specific content based on users’ geolocation for various reasons, including fraud prevention, price discrimination, and malicious traffic blocking. Scraping APIs enable users to access geo-targeted content in order to provide localized information. 

6. Automatic Proxy Rotation

The crawl rate limit is an anti-scraping technique that websites use to manage the volume of requests to their websites. When a client repeatedly requests a web server’s API from the same IP address, the website recognizes the client as a bot and restricts access to the web content. Automatic proxy rotation enables clients to change their IP addresses for each connection request.

Transparency statement

AIMultiple serves numerous emerging tech companies, including Bright Data and Smartproxy.

Further reading

For guidance to choose the right tool, check out data-driven list of web scrapers, and reach out to us:

Find the Right Vendors
Access Cem's 2 decades of B2B tech experience as a tech consultant, enterprise leader, startup entrepreneur & industry analyst. Leverage insights informing top Fortune 500 every month.
Cem Dilmegani
Principal Analyst
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Gulbahar Karatas
Gülbahar is an AIMultiple industry analyst focused on web data collections and applications of web data.

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