Top 8 Cloud Scrapers in 2026: What to Choose When You Don't Want to Code
Table of contents
- Introduction: why businesses need a cloud scraper in 2026
- Methodology for ranking cloud scrapers
- Selection and comparison criteria: what to look for when buying
- No. 1. octoparse — the best visual cloud scraper for a wide range of tasks
- No. 2. apify — the largest store of ready-made scrapers and a flexible cloud platform
- No. 3. browse ai — the fastest start for monitoring without learning
- No. 4. bright data web scraper — industrial infrastructure for heavy volumes
- No. 5. web scraper (webscraper.io) — an honest cloud scraper with transparent credits
- No. 6. parsehub — a proven desktop-cloud hybrid for complex sites
- No. 7. hexomatic — a cloud scraper with an automation pipeline and ai
- No. 8. simplescraper — a lightweight cloud scraper with ai extraction in a few clicks
- Comparison table of cloud scrapers 2026
- Alternatives not included in the main ranking
- Recommendations for choosing a cloud scraper
- Faq: common questions about cloud scrapers
- Conclusion: which cloud scraper to choose in 2026
Introduction: Why Businesses Need a Cloud Scraper in 2026
Data has long been the raw material for marketing, affiliate arbitrage, and e-commerce. Competitor prices, marketplace stock levels, reviews, job listings, classified ads, social media posts, search engine results. All of this needs to be collected regularly and in large volumes. Five years ago, such a task required hiring a developer who wrote a Python script, deployed it on a server, and then endlessly fixed it after every markup change. Today, for most typical scenarios, a cloud scraper is enough: a service where you specify a website, click to mark the fields you need, set a schedule, and get a table or JSON output.
This article focuses specifically on cloud services, not libraries or frameworks. We have separate materials on our blog about Scrapy, Playwright, BeautifulSoup, and custom solutions. Here we consciously draw the line: we only consider products where data collection runs on the provider's infrastructure and the user works through a visual interface, ready-made templates, or no-code setup. Small code snippets are acceptable as an option, but not as a mandatory requirement.
Who needs this. Marketers who monitor competitor prices and assortment. Affiliate marketers collecting creatives, landing pages, and offers. Marketplace store owners tracking positions and reviews. Analysts who need a data array for a report by tomorrow. And developers who don't want to waste time on infrastructure for a one-off task. We place special emphasis on the audience working with mobile proxies: for them, it's crucial whether they can connect their own IP addresses to a cloud scraper or must rely solely on the built-in pool.
In compiling this ranking, six groups of criteria were considered: functionality, price, proxy support, plan limits, ease of use, and quality of technical support. Pricing and capability data were verified as of January 2026 using official websites and service documentation. Prices for most providers are listed in US dollars, as that is how they appear on their sites.
Quick summary of results. First place goes to Octoparse as the most balanced visual cloud scraper with support for your own proxies. Second is Apify, which offers the largest store of ready-made solutions and flexible infrastructure. Third is Browse AI, the best option for those who want to start monitoring in five minutes without learning the interface. Next come Bright Data, Web Scraper, ParseHub, Hexomatic, and Simplescraper.
Methodology for Ranking Cloud Scrapers
We evaluated each service on six criteria with different weights. The weights reflect the priorities of the audience this review is written for: people who don't want to write code but work with large data volumes and their own proxies.
- Functionality (25%): visual builder, handling dynamic sites, pagination, authentication, scheduling, export formats, API, integrations.
- Price (20%): entry-level plan cost, cost per data unit, availability of a free plan, billing transparency.
- Proxy support (15%): built-in IP rotation, ability to connect your own mobile or residential proxies, geo settings.
- Limits (15%): number of tasks, parallel threads, pages or credits per month, frequency restrictions.
- Ease of Use (15%): learning curve, interface quality, availability of templates, speed of setting up the first project.
- Support Quality (10%): communication channels, response time, documentation, training materials, community.
Each service's final score was calculated as a weighted sum of criteria scores, rounded to one decimal place. In the service cards, we also provide a simplified score block in a format familiar to ranking readers.
Information was collected from open sources: official websites and pricing pages, knowledge bases, public API documentation, reviews on G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, and Product Hunt, and discussions in specialized communities. Where possible, we tested claimed features on free plans and trials. User reviews were considered as a secondary signal: they help identify systemic issues but do not replace our own testing.
What was not considered. We did not evaluate desktop programs without a cloud mode, libraries for developers, or services focused exclusively on a single platform. We did not consider affiliate terms, referral programs, or marketing promises without confirmation in documentation. We did not test services for violations of specific website rules and remind you: responsibility for the legality of data collection always lies with the user. Follow the terms of use of resources, data protection laws, and do not collect what you have no right to.
Selection and Comparison Criteria: What to Look for When Buying
Functionality
A good cloud scraper should handle sites where content loads via JavaScript, deal with infinite scrolling and pagination, pass authentication, fill out forms, and follow nested links. Scheduled operation is important because one-time collection is rarely needed, while monitoring prices or stock requires regularity. We also looked at export: CSV and Excel are available everywhere, but JSON, Google Sheets export, webhooks, and a full API are not. To make the top, a service must support dynamic sites and scheduling in the cloud.
Price
We compared not only the numbers on pricing pages but also the billing model. Some services charge a fixed monthly fee with task limits, others sell credits, and others count records or gigabytes of traffic. For the reader, it's important to understand, for example, how much it would cost to collect 10,000 product cards daily. We recalculated plans for such a typical scenario where possible. Threshold requirement: availability of a free plan or trial that lets you test the service on a real task.
Proxy Support
This is a criterion that most rankings mention in passing, but for our audience, it's key. Any mass data collection hits rate limits from a single IP. Cloud scrapers solve this differently: some offer built-in datacenter rotation, some sell residential traffic separately, and some let you connect your own proxies. The latter is especially valuable if you already have mobile proxies with the desired geo and want to use them for scraping sites sensitive to IP type. We checked three things: whether built-in rotation exists, whether you can set your own proxies, and on which plan this is available.
Limits
A nice entry-level price often hides strict limits: five projects, two hundred pages per run, one parallel thread. We looked at what the user actually gets for their money and how predictably credits are consumed. Services with opaque billing (where one page might cost one credit or ten depending on settings) received a lower score.
Ease of Use
The learning curve was measured by time to first result: how many minutes a novice needs to scrape data from a typical catalog. We considered the availability of ready-made templates for popular sites, auto-detection of fields, the quality of hints, and how logically the interface is structured. Services with a browser extension that lets you mark data directly on the site received extra points.
Support Quality
We evaluated communication channels (chat, email, tickets, community), response speed on free and paid plans, documentation completeness, and the availability of video tutorials. For services with a Russian-speaking audience, we noted whether materials are available in Russian. Threshold requirement: at least one communication channel with real people, not just a bot.
No. 1. Octoparse — The Best Visual Cloud Scraper for a Wide Range of Tasks
General Information
Octoparse has been developed by Octopus Data since 2016, headquartered in the US, with the main development team in China. Over ten years, the product has grown from a desktop program into a full ecosystem: a desktop app for Windows and macOS, a cloud platform for running tasks, a template store, and an API. Its specialty is visual no-code data collection from any website, from online stores and marketplaces to social media and classifieds. The target audience is broad: from freelancers to corporate analytics departments.
Key Features
- Visual builder with auto-detection of lists, pagination, and fields: the service suggests what to extract, and you adjust.
- Over 500 ready-made templates for popular sites, including Amazon, eBay, Google Maps, YouTube, Twitter, Booking, and major classifieds.
- Cloud execution on provider servers with parallel threads and a scheduler up to every-minute runs.
- Handling dynamic content: scrolling, clicks, waiting for loads, pop-ups, form entry, authentication.
- Built-in IP rotation and the ability to connect your own proxies, including mobile, in task settings.
- Export to CSV, Excel, JSON, HTML, upload to MySQL, SQL Server, integration with Google Sheets, Zapier, webhooks, and REST API.
- CAPTCHA solving, User-Agent rotation, setting intervals between requests.
A unique feature is the hybrid local and cloud mode. You set up a task on your computer, test for free, then send it to the cloud where it runs without your machine. Also noteworthy is the built-in AI assistant, which since 2024 suggests settings and helps with non-standard markup.
Pricing and Plans
- Free: $0, 10 tasks, local run only on your computer, export up to 10,000 rows at a time.
- Standard: $99 per month or $75 with annual billing. 100 tasks, 6 parallel cloud processes, IP rotation, scheduling, API, unlimited export.
- Professional: $249 per month or $208 with annual billing. 250 tasks, 20 parallel processes, priority support, extended API, more cloud storage.
- Enterprise: custom pricing, dedicated servers, unlimited tasks, account manager, and SLA.
The free plan is fully functional for learning and small one-off tasks but lacks cloud. The price-quality ratio on the Standard plan is one of the best in the category: for $75 you get unlimited pages within parallel threads, while competitors often count every page.
Pros
- No limit on pages scraped on paid plans: only task and thread counts are capped, which is beneficial for large volumes.
- Support for your own proxies in cloud mode: you can specify a list of addresses with authentication and set rotation intervals.
- A huge template library covering most typical scenarios for marketers and store owners without building from scratch.
- Mature handling of dynamic sites: the builder can wait for elements to load, click tabs, and handle conditions.
- Russian interface and some documentation in Russian, significantly lowering the entry barrier.
- Stability: the service has existed for ten years, updates regularly, and infrastructure rarely goes down.
Cons
- A desktop app is required to set up tasks: there's no Linux version, and the web editor is limited.
- The price jump from Free to Standard is significant: there's no intermediate plan at $20 or $30.
- The interface is overwhelming for beginners: many tabs, modes, and settings require a couple of hours to learn.
- Cloud execution speed on Standard can be lower than expected, especially for heavy pages with lots of JavaScript.
Who It's For
The ideal Octoparse user is a marketer or analyst who collects data regularly, works with dozens of sites, and is willing to learn the tool once. Typical tasks: monitoring marketplace prices, scraping product cards for content analysis, parsing reviews, extracting company contacts from directories, tracking real estate listings. Suitable for small and medium businesses, and the Enterprise plan covers large teams. For affiliate marketers, the ability to connect their own mobile proxies and collect data from platforms where datacenter IPs perform poorly is valuable.
Key advantage: unlimited pages plus support for your own proxies in the cloud at $75 per month.
Best for: regular mass no-code data collection with proxy control.
Overall score: 8.7/10
- Functionality: 9/10
- Price: 8/10
- Ease of use: 8/10
- Support: 8/10
- User reviews: 9/10
No. 2. Apify — The Largest Store of Ready-Made Scrapers and a Flexible Cloud Platform
General Information
Apify was founded in 2015 in Prague, Czech Republic. Initially, the platform was created for developers, but in recent years it has become a universal cloud scraper thanks to the Apify Store of ready-made solutions. It hosts over 4,000 so-called actors: configured scrapers for specific sites that run with a button click and form filling. Its specialty is data collection and automation in the cloud at any scale. The target audience is dual: developers build their own actors, while marketers and analysts use ready-made ones.
Key Features
- Apify Store with thousands of ready actors: scrapers for Instagram, TikTok, Google Maps, Amazon, LinkedIn, Booking, Zillow, YouTube, and hundreds of other resources.
- No-code launch: choose an actor, fill in fields (links, keywords, limits), click start, and get data in a dataset.
- Scheduler, webhooks, integrations with Zapier, Make, Google Drive, Slack, Airtable, plus a full REST API and client libraries.
- Built-in Apify Proxy with datacenter and residential addresses, automatic rotation, and country selection.
- Support for your own proxies: in most actors, you can specify your own addresses instead of built-in ones.
- Export to JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, HTML, RSS, cloud dataset storage with API access.
- Run monitoring, error notifications, versioning, real-time logs.
A unique feature is the marketplace model. Actors are created by independent developers and Apify itself, constantly updated to match site changes, and you pay either for compute resources or a fixed price per thousand results set by the author. This eliminates the main pain of scraping: maintaining the scraper after markup changes.
Pricing and Plans
- Free: $5 platform credit monthly without a card, access to all actors, limited memory and proxy.
- Starter: $49 per month, $49 credit, up to 32 GB RAM for parallel runs, datacenter proxies included.
- Scale: $199 per month, $199 credit, 128 GB memory, discounts on compute units and residential traffic.
- Business: $999 per month, $999 credit, 256 GB memory, priority support, dedicated manager.
Credit is spent on compute units (about $0.3–0.4 per unit depending on plan), residential proxies (around $8 per GB on starter plans, decreasing on higher tiers), and paid actors. Annual billing gives about a 10% discount. The price-quality ratio is good if you understand the billing model, and scary if you expect a fixed price: the cost per thousand records varies widely between actors.
Pros
- The widest site coverage among cloud scrapers: if a resource is popular, a ready actor almost certainly exists.
- Ready-made solutions are maintained by their authors, so you don't have to fix the scraper after every site update.
- Flexible proxy handling: built-in datacenter, residential with country selection, or fully your own addresses.
- Free plan without a card and with a real limit enough for tests and small tasks.
- Best-in-class integrations and API: data easily flows to any system or spreadsheet.
- Ability to grow from zero code to your own actors within one platform without migration.
Cons
- Complex payment model: credits, compute units, gigabytes, actor prices. Predicting costs is hard for beginners.
- Actor quality in the store is uneven: some are abandoned, some unstable, so check ratings and update dates.
- There's effectively no visual builder for arbitrary sites without code: the universal Web Scraper requires at least basic JavaScript.
- The interface is geared toward technical users; terminology (actor, dataset, run, build) takes getting used to.
Who It's For
Apify suits those who collect data from known platforms and want results without setup. Affiliate marketers use it to collect ads, comments, and social profiles. Marketers scrape Google Maps reviews and Amazon competitor cards. Developers value the infrastructure and API. It scales well from individual users to large companies. If your task is a non-standard site without an actor, look to Octoparse or Web Scraper.
Key advantage: thousands of ready maintained scrapers plus flexible proxy setup, including your own.
Best for: scraping popular platforms and social media without setup.
Overall score: 8.6/10
- Functionality: 10/10
- Price: 7/10
- Ease of use: 7/10
- Support: 8/10
- User reviews: 9/10
No. 3. Browse AI — The Fastest Start for Monitoring Without Learning
General Information
Browse AI launched in 2020, registered in Canada with an office in North America. From the start, it positioned itself as a cloud scraper for people who have never done data extraction. The concept is built around robots: you record actions in a browser extension, the service turns the recording into a robot that then runs in the cloud on schedule. Its main specialty is change monitoring and regular extraction of tabular data. The target audience is marketers, product managers, small businesses, recruiters, and analysts without a technical background.
Key Features
- Record a robot via Chrome extension: you click on the desired elements, and the service understands the list structure and suggests columns.
- Ready-made robots for popular sites: job aggregators, product catalogs, classifieds, company directories.
- Change monitoring with email, Slack, or webhook notifications: the robot compares data with the previous run and reports what changed.
- Mass launch: upload a list of thousands of links, the robot visits them all and collects a single table.
- Integration with Google Sheets, Airtable, Zapier, Make, Pabbly, export to CSV and JSON, REST API.
- Built-in IP rotation, human behavior emulation, CAPTCHA solving on higher plans.
- Auto-adaptation to markup changes: the system tries to find moved elements itself.
A unique feature is the focus on monitoring. Most cloud scrapers just dump data, but Browse AI is built as an alerting system: price changed, new job posted, assortment updated — you're the first to know.
Pricing and Plans
- Free: $0, 50 credits per month, 5 robots, daily runs, basic integrations.
- Starter: about $48 per month with annual billing and about $65 monthly, 2,000 credits, 10 robots, runs every 15 minutes, Google Sheets and API.
- Professional: about $123 per month with annual billing and about $165 monthly, 5,000 credits, 20 robots, runs every 5 minutes, priority support.
- Team: about $311 per month with annual billing and about $415 monthly, 10,000 credits, 30 robots, collaboration, dedicated manager.
One credit roughly equals one page, but complex scrolling and nested extraction increase consumption. Custom packages are available for large volumes. The price-quality ratio is average: for the money of Octoparse Standard, you get only 2,000 pages here, but save hours on setup.
Pros
- The lowest entry barrier in the ranking: the first robot is built in five minutes without reading documentation.
- Out-of-the-box change monitoring with notifications, turning the cloud scraper into a competitive intelligence system.
- Automatic adaptation to markup changes significantly reduces broken robots.
- Direct real-time export to Google Sheets without intermediate tools.
- Good free plan to test the idea: 50 pages per month is enough for a pilot monitoring of several competitors.
- Human behavior emulation and built-in IP rotation work without additional setup.
Cons
- You cannot connect your own proxies: the service works only with its own pool; you don't choose geo or address type.
- High cost per page at large volumes: tens of thousands of pages per month cost more than most competitors.
- Limited capabilities for complex scenarios: authentication, multi-step forms, and deep nesting are difficult.
- Extension only for Chrome and Chromium-based browsers.
Who It's For
Browse AI is for small business owners or marketers who want to track a dozen competitors and receive notifications without delving into technical details. Typical scenarios: monitoring competitor prices, tracking new job postings, checking product availability, collecting leads from directories. For affiliate marketers with their own mobile proxies, the service is less suitable due to the closed IP pool. It's optimal for micro and small businesses, and for teams where scraping is done by a non-specialist.
Key advantage: change monitoring with notifications and setup in five minutes.
Best for: beginners and small teams needing regular monitoring rather than one-off mass exports.
Overall score: 8.2/10
- Functionality: 7/10
- Price: 7/10
- Ease of use: 10/10
- Support: 8/10
- User reviews: 9/10
No. 4. Bright Data Web Scraper — Industrial Infrastructure for Heavy Volumes
General Information
Bright Data was founded in 2014 in Israel and is known primarily as the largest proxy provider. In recent years, the company has built a full suite of data collection tools: Web Scraper API with ready-made parsers for hundreds of domains, the visual Web Scraper IDE, ready-made datasets, and Web Unlocker. Its specialty is data collection at industrial scale with maximum reliability. The target audience is medium and large businesses, analytics agencies, and companies in e-commerce and finance.
Key Features
- Web Scraper API: over 100 ready-made parsers for Amazon, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Google, Zillow, Booking, and others, launched without code via a control panel.
- Ready datasets: pre-collected and regularly updated data arrays for marketplaces, social media, and companies, available for purchase or subscription.
- Web Scraper IDE with templates and visual debugging for non-standard sites (requires minimal JavaScript for fine-tuning).
- Own network of tens of millions of residential, mobile, and datacenter IPs with precise country and city targeting.
- Automatic CAPTCHA solving, browser fingerprint management, retries on errors.
- Data delivery via API, webhooks, to Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure, Snowflake, export to JSON, CSV, NDJSON.
- Scheduler, batch processing of thousands of links, monitoring and cost reports.
A unique feature is the built-in provider-level proxy network. For a cloud scraper, this means an almost zero failure rate even on heavily protected sites, because the entire rotation, fingerprinting, and CAPTCHA infrastructure is within one product.
Pricing and Plans
- Pay as you go: about $1 per 1,000 records for Web Scraper API with no monthly fee, free trial with test credit available.
- Growth: $499 per month with per-record price dropping to $0.85 per thousand.
- Business: $999 per month, about $0.75 per thousand records, priority support.
- Premium: $1,999 per month, about $0.7 per thousand, dedicated manager, SLA.
Web Unlocker (about $1.5 per thousand successful requests) and residential proxies ($5 to $8 per GB depending on volume) are billed separately. At large volumes, the per-record price is among the lowest in the ranking, but the entry threshold for regular use is high. There's no free plan as such, only a trial.
Pros
- Maximum reliability on protected sites thanks to its own network and request unlocking system.
- Transparent payment per successful record: failed requests are not charged.
- Precise geo-targeting down to city level, important for local prices and regional results.
- Ready datasets let you skip running a scraper if the provider already collected the data.
- Enterprise-level security, GDPR and CCPA compliance, legal review of use cases.
- Fast support on paid plans with real engineers, not scripts.
Cons
- High subscription cost: $499 per month for Growth cuts off small businesses and freelancers.
- Mandatory client verification and use-case checks: registration can take several days.
- For non-standard sites without a ready parser, work in the IDE is needed, which isn't exactly no-code.
- You cannot connect your own proxies; the service runs exclusively on its own network.
- The control panel interface is complex due to the huge number of products and settings.
Who It's For
Bright Data is a tool for companies where data collection is part of business processes, not a one-off task. Typical scenarios: daily monitoring of millions of marketplace prices, collecting data for model training, tracking brand violations, nationwide real estate market analysis. Suitable for medium and large businesses with a budget from $500 per month. Owners of their own mobile proxies cannot use them but can get mobile IPs from its network.
Key advantage: industrial reliability and payment only for successfully retrieved records.
Best for: companies with large volumes and strict stability requirements.
Overall score: 8.0/10
- Functionality: 10/10
- Price: 5/10
- Ease of use: 6/10
- Support: 9/10
- User reviews: 8/10
No. 5. Web Scraper (webscraper.io) — An Honest Cloud Scraper with Transparent Credits
General Information
Web Scraper has been developed since 2013 by a team in Riga, Latvia. It started as a free Chrome extension, still used by hundreds of thousands, and later gained the Web Scraper Cloud platform. The extension remains free and serves as a builder: you create a sitemap with selectors, then run it in the cloud on schedule. Its specialty is structured data collection from catalogs, online stores, and directories. The target audience is marketers, analysts, and small teams needing a predictable and inexpensive tool.
Key Features
- Free extension for Chrome and Firefox with visual element selection and a selector tree.
- Support for dynamic sites: scrolling, clicking load-more buttons, pagination, waiting for elements, extracting from pop-ups.
- Cloud runs with a scheduler, parallel tasks, and run history.
- Built-in proxy rotation on all cloud plans and the ability to specify your own proxies on higher tiers.
- Export to CSV, XLSX, JSON, upload to Dropbox, Google Sheets, Amazon S3, webhooks, and API.
- Post-scraping data processing: cleaning, regex, merging columns without external tools.
- Import and export of sitemaps in JSON, convenient for sharing settings within a team.
A unique feature is the transparent credit model where one credit equals one loaded page regardless of complexity. You always know how many pages remain and won't get unexpected charges.
Pricing and Plans
- Browser Extension: free and unlimited, but only on your computer and without scheduling.
- Project: $50 per month, 5,000 cloud credits, 2 parallel tasks, scheduler, proxies, export to Dropbox and Sheets.
- Professional: $100 per month, 20,000 credits, 3 parallel tasks, API, webhooks, your own proxies.
- Business: $200 per month, 50,000 credits, 5 parallel tasks, priority support.
- Scale: $300 per month, unlimited credits, 5+ parallel tasks for large volumes.
Annual billing offers a discount. The price-quality ratio is excellent for medium volumes: 20,000 pages for $100 is noticeably cheaper than a similar volume on Browse AI, and the Scale plan with unlimited competes with Octoparse Professional at a lower price.
Pros
- A completely free and powerful builder as an extension: you can learn the tool without spending a dime.
- Transparent billing: page equals credit, no complexity coefficients.
- Support for your own proxies in the cloud starting from Professional, allowing you to use your own mobile IPs.
- Unlimited Scale plan at $300 for teams with large volumes.
- Built-in data post-processor saves manual table cleaning.
- Stable operation for over ten years and a large community with ready-made sitemaps.
Cons
- Few ready-made templates for popular sites; almost everything must be configured manually.
- The logic of selectors and the sitemap tree requires understanding of HTML structure, a barrier for absolute beginners.
- Few parallel tasks: even on Business only 5 threads, so large projects run slowly.
- Support responds via email and forum, no live chat, response time on lower plans can be a day.
Who It's For
Web Scraper suits a marketer or analyst with a basic understanding of web page structure who values predictable costs. Typical tasks: scraping assortment and prices from online stores, parsing directories and company catalogs, exporting listing lists, regular monitoring of several hundred pages. Good for small businesses and small agencies. Affiliate marketers with mobile proxies should look at Professional and above, where connecting your own addresses is available.
Key advantage: transparent per-page pricing and a free full-featured builder.
Best for: budget-conscious teams with medium volumes and a desire to control costs.
Overall score: 7.9/10
- Functionality: 8/10
- Price: 9/10
- Ease of use: 7/10
- Support: 6/10
- User reviews: 8/10
No. 6. ParseHub — A Proven Desktop-Cloud Hybrid for Complex Sites
General Information
ParseHub has been operating since 2013, based in Toronto, Canada. It's one of the oldest visual scrapers on the market, built similarly to Octoparse: a desktop app for Windows, macOS, and Linux serves as the builder, and projects run on the provider's servers. Its specialty is extracting data from technically complex sites: interactive maps, calendars, forms with dependent fields, infinite scrolling. The target audience is analysts, researchers, data journalists, and small companies.
Key Features
- Visual builder with support for conditional logic, loops, variables, and regular expressions without writing code.
- Work with forms, dropdowns, calendars, tabs, pop-ups, and authentication.
- Cloud execution with scheduling, result storage, and completion notifications.
- IP rotation on paid plans to reduce errors during mass collection.
- Export to CSV, Excel, JSON, integration with Google Sheets, Dropbox, Tableau, REST API, and webhooks.
- Linux support in the desktop client, which Octoparse lacks.
- Training materials: detailed video tutorials and step-by-step guides for typical sites.
A unique feature is the depth of logic. ParseHub allows building scenarios with branches and conditions that other visual tools require scripts for. If you need to scrape a site where each region requires selecting a value in three linked filters, ParseHub can handle it.
Pricing and Plans
- Free: $0, 5 public projects, 200 pages per run, speed about 200 pages in 40 minutes, data storage 14 days.
- Standard: $189 per month or about $155 with annual billing. 20 private projects, 10,000 pages per run, 200 pages in 10 minutes, IP rotation, scheduling, 14-day storage.
- Professional: $599 per month or about $499 with annual billing. 120 projects, unlimited pages per run, 200 pages in under 2 minutes, priority support, 30-day storage.
- Enterprise: custom pricing, dedicated servers, unlimited speed.
The price-quality ratio is the weak point. For $189 you get capabilities that Octoparse offers for $99 and Web Scraper for $100. The free plan, however, is one of the most generous for learning and small tasks.
Pros
- The best visual implementation of conditional logic and form handling in the ranking.
- Generous free tier with cloud execution, not just local mode.
- A Linux client, rare among visual scrapers.
- Good integration with analytics tools, including Tableau.
- Quality documentation and video courses that actually teach from scratch.
- Stable execution on complex sites where simpler tools break.
Cons
- High price for paid plans relative to competitors with comparable functionality.
- No built-in way to connect your own proxies: only built-in rotation without choosing address type or geo.
- Low speed on Free and Standard: 200 pages in 10 minutes means 10,000 pages take 8 hours.
- The desktop client interface looks outdated and hasn't received a major update in a while.
- Almost no ready-made templates; every project is built manually.
Who It's For
ParseHub is worth considering when your target site is technically complex and volumes are moderate. A researcher collecting data from government portals with multi-level filters. An analyst needing data from an interactive map. A journalist working with open registries. For affiliate marketers and store owners with large volumes and their own mobile proxies, the service is less suitable: expensive, slow, and no own IPs. Optimal for individual specialists and micro-teams with a budget up to $200.
Key advantage: visual conditional logic for sites where other builders fail.
Best for: complex interactive sites at small volumes.
Overall score: 7.5/10
- Functionality: 8/10
- Price: 5/10
- Ease of use: 7/10
- Support: 8/10
- User reviews: 8/10
No. 7. Hexomatic — A Cloud Scraper with an Automation Pipeline and AI
General Information
Hexomatic launched in 2020 by Hexact, founded by entrepreneurs from Armenia with registration in the US. The product is conceived as a workflow platform: data collection is just the first step, followed by over a hundred automations, from translation and language detection to email verification and AI text generation. Its specialty is building chains: scrape, enrich, verify, export. The target audience is marketers, lead generation specialists, agencies, and entrepreneurs who need not just a scraper but a business process builder.
Key Features
- Visual scraper builder with action recording and auto-detection of fields.
- Over 100 ready-made automations: domain checks, contact finding, email and phone extraction, SEO audit, screenshots, translation, processing via GPT and Claude models.
- Ready-made recipes for scraping Amazon, Google Maps, YouTube, social media, and directories.
- Scheduler with timed runs and event triggers.
- Built-in datacenter proxies and optional Hexomatic residential proxies for an extra fee.
- Export to CSV, Google Sheets, integrations with Zapier, Make, Pabbly, webhooks, and API.
- Team collaboration and shared workflows.
A unique feature is the pipeline approach. One workflow can collect a list of companies from Google Maps, find contacts on their sites, verify email validity, translate descriptions, and write everything to a table. In other cloud scrapers, this would require three tools.
Pricing and Plans
- Free: $0, limited trial credits, access to basic automations for testing.
- Bronze: about $24 per month on monthly billing and noticeably cheaper annually, limited workflows and automations.
- Silver: about $49 per month, expanded limits, access to all automations, scheduler.
- Gold: about $99 per month, maximum limits, priority support, team access.
The service regularly runs lifetime deal promotions, so site prices change more often than competitors. Residential proxies and premium automations (AI, CAPTCHA solving) consume separate premium credits. The price-quality ratio is good for lead generation and average for pure scraping, as page limits on lower plans are modest.
Pros
- The lowest entry-level paid plan in the ranking.
- Data enrichment within the platform: no need to link multiple services via Zapier.
- Integration with language models for classification, summarization, and generation based on collected data.
- Ready-made lead generation recipes especially valued by agencies and sales departments.
- Active development: new automations appear almost monthly.
- Direct export to Google Sheets and convenient team collaboration.
Cons
- You cannot connect your own proxies, only built-in datacenter or residential from the service for extra credits.
- Confusing credit system: regular and premium credits, different coefficients for different automations.
- The scraper builder lags behind Octoparse and ParseHub on complex sites, especially with nested pagination.
- Execution speed for large workflows is low; queues on lower plans can stretch.
- Support responds mainly via email and chat with delay; documentation sometimes lags behind the interface.
Who It's For
Hexomatic suits a marketing agency or sales department where data collection immediately leads to processing and outreach. Typical tasks: collecting company databases with contacts, auditing competitor sites, finding placement opportunities, preparing data for cold emails, automatic product categorization via AI. Suitable for small businesses and agencies. For affiliate marketers with mobile proxies, the limitation is the same as Browse AI: you can't connect your own IPs.
Key advantage: an automation pipeline with AI on top of data collection.
Best for: lead generation and data enrichment without linking multiple services.
Overall score: 7.3/10
- Functionality: 8/10
- Price: 8/10
- Ease of use: 7/10
- Support: 6/10
- User reviews: 7/10
No. 8. Simplescraper — A Lightweight Cloud Scraper with AI Extraction in a Few Clicks
General Information
Simplescraper was founded in 2018, based in Australia. The product was created with maximum simplicity in mind: a Chrome extension where you click on data, and a cloud that runs collection on schedule. In 2024, the service added AI extraction, where you just describe in words what to pull from the page. Its specialty is fast structured data collection from catalogs and lists, and turning any site into an API. The target audience is entrepreneurs, marketers, and product managers with small to medium tasks.
Key Features
- Chrome extension with visual selection and automatic detection of similar elements on the page.
- AI extraction: describe the fields you need in text, and the model finds them on the page and returns a structured result.
- Cloud runs on schedule with result history.
- Instant API: any configured recipe is available as an endpoint returning JSON.
- Pagination handling and deep collection: going inside each list card to extract details.
- Export to CSV, JSON, integration with Google Sheets, Airtable, Zapier, webhooks.
- Built-in proxy rotation and JavaScript rendering in the cloud.
A unique feature is turning a site into an API in a minute. Set up a recipe, get a link, call it from any app or spreadsheet and always get fresh data. For developers who don't want to write a scraper, this is the shortest path.
Pricing and Plans
- Free: $0, 100 cloud credits per month, unlimited local collection via the extension.
- Plus: $35 per month, 6,000 credits, scheduling, API, integrations.
- Pro: $70 per month, 20,000 credits, increased speed, priority processing.
- Premium: $150 per month, 60,000 credits, maximum limits and support.
One credit equals one page; AI extraction and rendering heavy pages may consume more. The price-quality ratio is good: 20,000 pages for $70 is cheaper than Web Scraper, though functionality is more modest.
Pros
- One of the simplest interfaces in the ranking, comparable to Browse AI in startup speed.
- AI extraction lets you scrape sites with non-standard markup without configuring selectors.
- Instant API for each recipe at no extra cost.
- Low price per page at medium volumes.
- Free extension with unlimited local collection for quick one-off tasks.
Cons
- Your own proxies are not supported; the built-in pool's geo cannot be chosen.
- Weak handling of complex scenarios: authentication, forms, and conditional logic are minimally implemented.
- Small team: updates are less frequent, and support responds slower than the leaders.
- Few ready-made templates; the community is smaller than Octoparse or Apify.
- Chrome only, no extensions for other browsers.
Who It's For
Simplescraper is for an entrepreneur or marketer who needs to quickly and inexpensively collect lists: products, listings, posts, catalogs. Also suitable for a developer who wants JSON from a site without writing a custom scraper. Good for micro and small businesses. For complex sites and tasks with your own mobile proxies, choose Octoparse or Web Scraper.
Key advantage: AI extraction and turning a site into an API in a minute.
Best for: simple lists and quick API data retrieval without development.
Overall score: 7.1/10
- Functionality: 6/10
- Price: 8/10
- Ease of use: 9/10
- Support: 6/10
- User reviews: 7/10
Comparison Table of Cloud Scrapers 2026
Below are the key parameters of all eight services in a unified format so you can quickly compare them by the criteria that matter to you.
- Octoparse: entry paid plan $75/month with annual billing; free plan available (local); limit on tasks and threads, unlimited pages; built-in IP rotation yes; own proxies supported; over 500 templates; desktop builder; API yes; overall score 8.7.
- Apify: entry paid plan $49/month; free plan available ($5 credit); limit on credits and memory; built-in datacenter and residential proxies; own proxies supported; over 4,000 ready actors; builder for arbitrary sites requires code; best-in-class API; overall score 8.6.
- Browse AI: entry paid plan about $48/month with annual billing; free plan available (50 credits); limit on credits and number of robots; built-in IP rotation yes; own proxies not supported; ready-made robots available; builder via Chrome extension; API yes; overall score 8.2.
- Bright Data: pay from $1 per 1,000 records or from $499/month by subscription; no free plan, only trial; limit by budget; own network of residential and mobile IPs with geo-targeting; own proxies not supported; over 100 ready parsers and datasets; builder in IDE with code elements; API yes; overall score 8.0.
- Web Scraper: entry paid plan $50/month; free extension unlimited; limit by credits, 1 page equals 1 credit, unlimited at $300; built-in IP rotation yes; own proxies supported from Professional plan; few templates; builder via extension; API yes; overall score 7.9.
- ParseHub: entry paid plan about $155/month with annual billing; free plan available (200 pages per run, cloud); limit by projects, pages, and speed; built-in IP rotation yes on paid plans; own proxies not supported; almost no templates; desktop builder, including Linux; API yes; overall score 7.5.
- Hexomatic: entry paid plan about $24/month; free plan available (trial credits); limit by two types of credits; built-in datacenter proxies and paid residential; own proxies not supported; over 100 automations and recipes; web interface builder; API yes; overall score 7.3.
- Simplescraper: entry paid plan $35/month; free plan available (100 credits); limit by credits; built-in IP rotation yes; own proxies not supported; few templates, AI extraction available; builder via Chrome extension; instant API for each recipe; overall score 7.1.
We separately highlight a parameter critical for the audience with their own mobile proxies. You can connect your own addresses only in three of the eight services: Octoparse, Apify, and Web Scraper. The rest work exclusively on their own pools, and if a site is sensitive to IP type, you'll have to rely on the provider's built-in residential or mobile addresses for an extra fee.
Alternatives Not Included in the Main Ranking
Several services came close to making the top but fell short on combined criteria. Nevertheless, in certain scenarios they may be the best choice.
PhantomBuster — a cloud automation platform focused on social and professional networks. It excels at collecting profiles, posts, and contact lists, but it's more a lead generation tool than a universal cloud scraper. It didn't make the ranking due to narrow specialization and high cost per data unit. Consider it if your work is entirely focused on social media and you're willing to pay from $56 per month for convenient ready-made scenarios.
Import.io — a market veteran with enterprise positioning. A powerful visual builder, quality support, and data enrichment, but prices are not published and the entry threshold starts at several hundred dollars per month after negotiations with sales. It didn't make the ranking due to opaque pricing. Consider it if you're a large company needing a vendor with a contract, SLA, and personal onboarding.
Axiom.ai and Bardeen — browser-based no-code automation assistants that can scrape but do it as a side function. Axiom runs scenarios in the cloud, Bardeen is stronger in integrations with work apps. Both lag behind specialized scrapers in volume and stability. They suit if data collection is just part of a broader routine automation.
Zyte (formerly Scrapinghub) — a serious platform with automatic AI data extraction and its own site access system. However, without code, you can only use the automatic extraction API; the rest is designed for developers familiar with Scrapy. It didn't make the ranking due to thematic boundaries: the product is closer to developer tools, which have separate materials on our blog.
Recommendations for Choosing a Cloud Scraper
There's no universal answer: the best cloud scraper depends on tasks, volume, budget, and how important IP control is. Below are brief recommendations for typical profiles.
- Best for beginners: Browse AI. First working robot in five minutes, change notifications, and spreadsheet export. If volumes are small and you don't need your own proxies, it's the most comfortable start. Backup option — Simplescraper with AI extraction.
- Best for professionals: Apify. Thousands of ready solutions, flexible infrastructure, best integrations, and the ability to grow to your own actors. For those preferring visual setup of arbitrary sites, the professional choice is Octoparse.
- Best value: Web Scraper at medium volumes thanks to transparent credits and unlimited at $300, and Hexomatic for those needing a minimal entry ticket. At very large volumes, the per-record price at Bright Data is the lowest, but with high subscription fees.
- Best functionality: Bright Data and Apify share first place. The former wins in reliability and geo-targeting, the latter in breadth and flexibility. For complex interactive sites without code, we separately note ParseHub.
- Best for small business: Octoparse on Standard or Web Scraper on Project and Professional. Both offer predictable costs, scheduling, and the ability to connect your own proxies.
- Best for medium business: Octoparse Professional or Apify Scale. Enough parallel threads, API for integration into internal systems, and adequate support.
- Best for large business: Bright Data. Legal cleanliness of processes, SLA, ready datasets, and infrastructure that doesn't fall under millions of pages.
- Best for mobile proxy owners: Octoparse, Apify, or Web Scraper. Only these three services allow you to specify your own addresses in cloud tasks. This gives control over geo, IP type, and traffic costs, important when working with platforms that react differently to datacenter and mobile addresses.
A few practical tips. Always start with a free plan and a real task, not a demo site. Check how credits are counted on your pages: heavy cards with lazy loading can consume many times more. Set reasonable intervals between requests: aggressive scraping harms both you and the target site. And think about post-processing in advance: where data will be stored, who will clean it, and how it will reach reports.
FAQ: Common Questions About Cloud Scrapers
How is a cloud scraper different from a desktop program or library?
A cloud scraper runs data collection on the provider's servers: your computer can be off while tasks run on schedule. A desktop program works only while running, and traffic goes from your IP. Libraries require writing code and your own infrastructure. Some services in the ranking, such as Octoparse and ParseHub, combine a desktop builder with cloud execution.
Can I connect my own mobile proxies to a cloud scraper?
Yes, but not everywhere. Of the eight services in the ranking, Octoparse, Apify, and Web Scraper (from Professional) natively accept your proxies. Usually it's a list of addresses in host, port, login, password format with rotation by time or request. Browse AI, Bright Data, ParseHub, Hexomatic, and Simplescraper work only on their own pools.
What are credits and how do I know how many I'll need?
A credit is a billing unit, usually equal to one loaded page. With Web Scraper and Simplescraper, the ratio is almost always one-to-one. With Browse AI and Hexomatic, complex pages and additional operations cost more. With Apify, compute units are consumed, depending on memory and runtime. The best way to estimate consumption is to run a hundred typical pages on the free plan and multiply.
Which cloud scraper is best for marketplaces?
For major international platforms like Amazon, ready solutions from Apify and Bright Data are most convenient: they're maintained against markup changes. For smaller or regional marketplaces and niche stores, a visual builder is often needed, and here Octoparse and Web Scraper are better, especially with your own proxies from the desired region.
Do I need to know how to code to use Apify?
For ready actors from the store — no: you fill out a form and click start. Code is needed only if the actor you need doesn't exist and you want to set up scraping from an arbitrary site. In that case, visual builders like Octoparse or ParseHub would be more convenient.
How do cloud scrapers handle CAPTCHAs?
Most services in the ranking offer automatic solving on paid plans, often for extra credits. The most mature system is Bright Data, then Octoparse and Apify. However, the best strategy is not to provoke CAPTCHAs: moderate request frequency, quality IP addresses, and plausible headers reduce their appearance significantly.
How much does daily scraping of 10,000 pages per month cost?
Let's say 300,000 pages per month. With Octoparse, this fits into Standard for $75–99 with sufficient thread speed. With Web Scraper, you'll need the Scale plan at $300. With Browse AI, the volume exceeds standard plans and requires a custom package from several hundred dollars. With Bright Data at about $1 per thousand requests, it's about $300 on PAYG. With Apify, cost depends on the actor, roughly $100 to $400.
Is it legal to collect data with a cloud scraper?
Collecting publicly available information is not prohibited per se, but there are boundaries: the terms of use of a specific site, data protection laws, copyright, and the prohibition of creating excessive load on a resource. Before launching, study the platform's rules, do not collect personal data without a legal basis, and do not use results for purposes that violate the law. Responsibility always lies with the user, not the service.
What should I do if a site changes its markup and the scraper breaks?
With services offering ready solutions (Apify, Bright Data, Browse AI), an update usually comes from the developer within days. In builders (Octoparse, Web Scraper, ParseHub), you need to fix selectors manually, usually taking a few minutes. Browse AI and Simplescraper try to adapt automatically but not always successfully. Set up error notifications to learn about breakage immediately.
Is there Russian-language support for the services in the ranking?
Full Russian-language support is absent for all eight services. Octoparse offers a Russian interface and some documentation. The rest work in English, but most questions can be resolved via knowledge bases and translators. For large clients, Bright Data and Apify can provide support in various languages through a manager.
Conclusion: Which Cloud Scraper to Choose in 2026
The market for no-code cloud scrapers has grown and structured noticeably over the past two years. The leaders remain Octoparse with the best balance of visual builder, unlimited pages, and support for your own proxies, and Apify with the largest store of ready solutions and the most flexible infrastructure. Browse AI has taken the niche of the friendliest monitoring tool, Bright Data — the industrial solution for large volumes. Web Scraper remains the most honest on pricing, ParseHub helps on complex sites, Hexomatic combines collection with AI enrichment, and Simplescraper provides a quick API for minimal money.
The final recommendations are simple. If you need control over IP addresses and work with your own mobile proxies, choose between Octoparse, Apify, and Web Scraper. If the priority is startup speed and notifications, go with Browse AI. If volumes are measured in millions of pages and budget allows, look at Bright Data. And in any case, start with a free plan on your real task.
Trends of 2024–2025 that shaped the current market state. First — AI extraction: instead of configuring selectors, the user describes the needed fields in words, and this already works with Simplescraper, Hexomatic, Octoparse, and Zyte. Second — the shift from tools to marketplaces of ready solutions, where Apify set the standard and Bright Data and Browse AI followed. Third — the convergence of scraping and proxy infrastructure: IP providers build scrapers, and scrapers buy traffic, blurring the line between categories. Fourth — payment for results: the model where only successfully retrieved records are billed is becoming the expected norm.
What to expect next. In 2026, AI agents will not only extract data but also independently fix broken scenarios and choose the optimal request strategy for a specific site. Regulation will tighten: services will more strictly check use cases and require confirmation of legal grounds for collecting personal data. Demand for quality mobile and residential IPs will grow, as site protection systems distinguish address types more accurately. And new players from automation platforms are likely to emerge, for which a cloud scraper becomes a built-in feature rather than a separate product.
Pricing and feature information is current as of January 2026. Services regularly change prices and limits, so check official pages before paying. We will update the ranking as significant market changes occur.