Best Data Collection Companies in 2022

Bright Data (formerly Luminati Network) is the go-to data collection company for more than 10,000 customers, including Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, and university research institutions. That’s not surprising, as the company provides comprehensive and cost-effective data gathering solutions with its Data Collector. 

We liked Data Collector’s ability to react to any changes during the scanning process. Most sites use various blocking methods if they detect an increased number of requests from the same IP address. Data Collector efficiently avoids this by using proxies enabled by Bright Data’s multitude of data centers across the world. No matter what type of collector you’re using, all of them benefit from Bright Data’s extensive network of IPs. Because of that, your data collection is not at risk of being stopped or compromised. Furthermore, the software adjusts to any changes made on the website. 

There are a few methods you can use to start collecting data. You can use the premade collectors for multiple categories that Bright Data’s software solution includes. They already cover a wide array of different use cases like social media, eCommerce websites, travel-related services, news, finance, and business. Of course, it’s up to you what information you want to gather from those websites. For instance, you can collect product information from Amazon based on a URL or a keyword and use the information for your market analytics.

By using the Data Collector browser extension, you can create custom collectors for any website. By selecting elements directly from the webpage, you pick information that the crawler will focus on.

Suppose you haven’t found an appropriate premade solution for your data collection. In that case, Bright Data offers you the option to develop your own within the company’s data collection tool. Of course, this is designed for those who are coding-proficient. If your team doesn’t include any IT professionals, there’s no need to worry, as you can request a custom collector directly from Bright Data. 

When you decide on a collector, you can see how the results look when formatted as a CSV file or JSON. Furthermore, data can be exported in an Excel file, allowing for more advanced data analytics to be performed with the results from the web-scraping software. 

Data Collector is a tool that will save you resources and time while reducing the cost of gathering data. You can define the intervals at which your information is collected, so you can also get real-time updates. 

Data Collector has multiple API integrations that can help you better streamline the process, and you can find a bunch of helpful documentation on the company’s website. 

If you decide to implement this web-crawling solution to better understand your consumers’ behavior or help further improve your brand, you’ll receive plenty of support from Bright Data. We liked that Bright Data offers webinars, as well as maintaining an active blog that also serves as a valuable resource for learning. 

Depending on your company’s needs, you can choose between a monthly, yearly, or pay-as-you-go subscription. While Bright Data’s solution is pricier than some other options on the market, ranging from $315 to $1,800 per month with the yearly subscription, the service more than compensates for that with the results it produces.

Octoparse is another web crawler that collects data from websites, organizes it into an easily readable table format, and does it without asking you to code. This software solution automates data extraction while keeping it simple with a user-friendly point-and-click interface. 

Octoparse 8.1.24 can be used both locally or as a cloud-based software solution. It works on macOS 10.10 or higher and Windows 7, 8, and 10 (x64). For x32 systems, you’re advised to use the older Octoparse 7.3.0 version. 

The software provides you with a comprehensive tool that can help you monitor prices, generate leads, develop marketing strategies, and even conduct research. Octoparse has 52 premade web-scraping templates, which can extract information from social media, eCommerce websites, travel-oriented services, directories, job boards, real estate websites, and other sources.

Octoparse has a simple and effective UI that makes it easy to compile data. In three simple steps, you can start the extraction process. First, you need to create a new task and enter the URL that the web crawler needs to process. When the page loads, you’ll notice that the software detects the content on the page and, by default, highlights important elements. 

During the second step, it’s up to you to see if the selected features on the page align with what you need, at which point you can add and remove information. Octoparse will show you a preview of the information, and you can move columns around or delete them to exclude certain information. There are also some other valuable features like scrolling through the page to load further. 

The third and final step is to run the data collection task, and you have several options there as well. You can perform the operation on your device, run it on the cloud, or schedule it for execution on the cloud later. You can find the data in your Octoparse Account once the process is completed. Octoparse can deliver your results in the following formats: CSV, Excel, HTML, and JSON. 

Octoparse offers convenient features that businesses and research teams will find helpful. With proxies and IP rotation, you don’t have to worry that the website will ban your IP address. Some websites that are difficult for scraping data, like those built with AJAX and JavaScript, are easily processed by this software. Octoparse can even collect data from a login and handle infinitely scrolling webpages like some social media sites have. The software solution’s API integration can help you acquire data in real-time. 

Octoparse comes with a free plan that can process 10,000 records per export, offers 10 crawlers, and imposes no limitations on pages per crawl and the number of computers you use it on. The price for a Standard plan is $75 per month if billed annually, and that rises to $209 per month for the Professional plan. The Additional Data and Crawler Service packages will set you back $399 and $189 per month respectively. 

Opinions on Octoparse are divided online, but in our experience it can be a helpful tool for many companies and enterprises. While it lacks the flexibility of some other software solutions, it compensates for that with its easy-to-use approach.

Data collection services are essential, and Web Scraper is another crucial tool for analysts, market researchers, and enterprises. The company offers its software solution in the form of a browser extension and a cloud service. 

Web Scraper has a simple point-and-click interface, and you can download the browser extension for Chrome and Firefox. Scraping a website involves a few steps, including creating a sitemap by adding a homepage URL. The app itself requires you to do some legwork, as you’ll have to generate selectors for subcategories and individual selectors for each type of data you need to extract. You need to set up different types of selectors, like text or link, before starting the process. You can then download the results as a CSV file. 

While the browser extension is a nice solution for a free data collection tool, it’s not as user-friendly as the Web Scraper Cloud solution. There are four different paid plans ranging from $50 per month for the Project plan to $300 for the Scale plan. If you subscribe, you’ll get access to a scheduler, proxy, several export options, and the option to save the results as CSV, XLSX, and JSON files. Furthermore, the Web Scraper Cloud plan works better with dynamic websites, and you’ll also get access to the API.

Depending on the plan you choose, you’ll be assigned an amount of “cloud credits,” which correspond in a one-to-one ratio to the number of pages you can crawl. Our review found that only the Business and Scale plans have enough credits for comprehensive research, as they come with 50,000 and unlimited searches respectively. 

Web Scraper finds its use cases with lead generation, eCommerce, retail monitoring, brand analysis, business intelligence, marketing, business strategy, and extracting statistics from large amounts of data. Unfortunately, there are no pre-made solutions for websites like Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Walmart, Booking, Netflix, Tripadvisor, and many others featured by the competition. 

Web Scraper offers extensive documentation, video tutorials, a blog, and how-to guides that serve as excellent learning materials for its users. Furthermore, even with the free version, you can access these learning materials and speak with the community through the official forum. It’s not a bad idea to test out how the Web Scraper extension works with test sites provided by the developer, as it will help you prepare for more complicated tasks.

Another data collection software option on our list is ParseHub. The application is available for macOS and Windows, and it’s the only Linux-compatible software application we tested, besides web-based software solutions. 

ParseHub can find its way around complex JavaScript and AJAX-based websites, and it’s able to go through forms, dropdown menus, and even popups to find the necessary data. The application also covers websites with infinite scrolling, interactive maps, and calendars. The software uses a range of proxy servers to rotate IP addresses, thus avoiding a situation where you might be banned from accessing the website you’re analyzing.

ParseHub is a handy tool for consultants, analysts, sales leads, aggregating data, researchers, and eCommerce. Developers will also find the application convenient, as they can integrate their applications with ParseHub’s REST API and make use of scraped information.

Like the other solutions we’ve reviewed, ParseHub requires no coding; the application does the brunt of the work for you. However, there are a few steps that you need to become familiar with if you want to use the application effectively. 

The program’s user interface is intuitive and doesn’t require too much time to get used to. After loading the webpage, you need to set up selectors, of which ParseHub has XPATH, CSS, and RegEx, as well as other common selectors found in website data collection solutions. 

The graphic interface will effectively show you what information you’ve set up for extraction, and it may require you to take a few extra steps to properly set up the software. When you’re selecting an element from the page, the software will suggest others that it finds fitting in the same class. 

You have plenty of options when it comes to accessing your scraping results, and you can sort the data into JSON, CSV, and Excel files or import them directly into Google Sheets. Anyone wanting to add further visualization options to their data can do so with Tableau; ParseHub can easily integrate with the application via CSV import or Google Sheets implementation. The API integration allows you to extract data directly to your software application, which most developers find extremely useful. 

ParseHub does a great job at instructing new users on how to use the software. The company offers web courses that cover everything from basics to advanced web-scraping techniques. ParseHub has a YouTube channel with excellent video material that you’ll find quite helpful; there are step-by-step examples of how you can gather data from various sites like Reddit, Walmart, Yelp, Amazon, and many others. For those that prefer to read through instructions, ParseHub’s help center has extensive information and covers everything you might need to run the data collector successfully. 

ParseHub has a free plan, which gives you an excellent opportunity to explore how you can incorporate a tool for data collection into your organization and workflow. However, we’d recommend looking into paid plans for business endeavors, as they allow for more projects and more pages per run for analysis. 

Standard and Professional subscriptions go for $149 and $499 per month, and there’s a 15% discount for quarterly billing. Even though those two plans are considerably better than the Free plan, they feel somewhat limited compared to what other market research and data collection companies offer.

ProWebScraper is a cloud-based data collecting solution. Suppose your business needs to process data found on job boards, listings, online marketplaces, hospitality services, the stock market, or the news media. In that case, you’ll find that having the ProWebScraper tool can significantly speed up your work. 

ProWebScraper can be set up for any website. The web-based app has a simple point-and-click interface, and it’s capable of processing more complex websites. You can set up custom rules with XPATH, CSS, and RegEx selectors to dig up hidden info or better configure your scraping settings. You can use the pagination feature to extract the same data type from a string of pages, while chaining goes through sublinks to retrieve more data.

While ProWebScraper offers plenty of selectors and handy options, we found the lack of premade options for popular websites like Amazon, Booking, eBay, or social media websites disappointing. 

Thankfully, you have several options for downloading your results; you can choose between CSV, Excel, XML, or JSON. The REST API integration with custom software is available so that the scraping tool can work seamlessly with organizations that have established software solutions. Furthermore, you can also extract high-quality images besides. 

ProWebScraper has a convenient blog that covers exciting tips and valuable guides on the data collecting process. Besides that, the knowledge base covers the essentials so you can use the software without a hitch. 

If you’re intrigued by the offer, you can always try out ProWebScraper for free. That offer lets you scrape information from 100 pages corresponding to 100 credits. 

In terms of paid subscriptions, you can get the Active Plan for $40 per month, which will give you 5,000 credits. The credit-to-page ratio will depend on the type of scraper you use. 

For the Standard scraper, you get simple information extracted from simple HTTP pages through ProWebScraper’s proxies at one credit per page. The Premium scraper is reserved for major sites like Amazon and Yelp, as they have more JavaScript-heavy pages, and the rating is three credits per page. The scraper with the highest cost per page is Ultra; it can collect information behind logins and infinite scrolling pages. Ultra’s rate is five credits per page. 

We found that ProWebScraper’s pricing approach isn’t the most cost-effective when compared to other reviewed products on our list. While it gives you great flexibility to customize your plan, you’re better off with plans that don’t categorize your scraping process according to the website you’re researching.