11 Best Free & Paid Web Crawling Tools in 2025

People and companies often use web crawling tools to easily extract data from different sources since they're fast, effective, and can save you from stress compared to other methods.

So which one should you use? We researched and tested many free and paid ones available on the web, then came up with the 11 best web crawling tools and software to use:

Let's dive into the details and discuss these web crawling tools and their pros and cons. But before that, it's essential to understand what web crawling is.

What Is Web Crawling?

Web crawling means discovering and following URLs systematically across different web pages using software or automated scripts. These scripts are known as web crawlers, spiders, or web scraping bots.

Although sometimes used interchangeably with web scraping, crawling is one of the steps of web scraping. However, like scraping, crawling usually aims to extract data from the crawled pages.

What Are the Types of Web Crawling Tools?

A web crawling tool can be in-house, commercial, or open-source. Let's see what each means.

• In-house web crawling tools are created internally by businesses to crawl websites for various tasks. A famous example is Googlebot, which helps Google index content for its search engine.
• Commercial crawling software is a commercially available tool, like ZenRows. These tools require a subscription since they help you handle crawling intricacies more efficiently.
• Open-source crawling tools, like Scrapy, allow anybody to use and customize them as necessary. They're usually language-specific. For instance, there are many JavaScript web crawlers.

Before choosing a web crawling tool, you must first understand what to look for or how to choose the best option for your needs. No worries. The following reviews will help you understand more.

1. ZenRows: Overall Best Crawling Tool

Language: Supports all programming languages

ZenRows is the best web crawling tool to consider if you want to extract data without getting blocked. It's beginner-friendly and can bypass even the strongest anti-bots and CAPTCHAs, making the crawling process fast and smooth.

Some of its features include rotating premium proxies, headless browsers, geotargeting, anti-bot and CAPTCHA bypass, and more. You can kickstart your crawling project with ZenRows for free using a single API call. 

👍 Pros:

• Easy to use.
• Compatible with all languages.
• Can bypass anti-bots and CAPTCHAs while crawling.
• Supports concurrent requests.
• Up to 99.9% uptime guarantee.
• Offers a large residential proxy pool and supports geotargeting.
• Suitable for large-scale web scraping without getting blocked.
• Support for JavaScript rendering and headless browsers.

👎 Cons:

• It requires complementary tools like BeautifulSoup for parsing.

💲 Pricing:

ZenRows offers unified pricing for all its services. The plans start as low as $69 per month. It includes a free trial and only charges for successful requests.

2. Scrapy: Best Free Web Crawling Library for Python

Language: Python | GitHub: 53.2k+ stars

Scrapy is an open-source web crawling tool that runs on Python. It provides a pre-built framework for programmers to customize their web crawler and extract data from the web at a large scale. The library is asynchronous by default, making it suitable for concurrent large-scale scraping.

Scrapy includes item pipelining to modify and store data on the fly. It also features middleware support, providing an interface to easily integrate your web crawler with proxies and commercial crawling tools such as ZenRows for efficient crawling.

👍 Pros:

• It's a free crawling tool
• Suitable for large-scale scraping and crawling tasks. 
• Built-in proxy middleware to avoid IP bans.
• Supports middleware for ZenRows to avoid getting blocked.
• Includes item pipeline for data manipulation and storage.

👎 Cons:

• Scrapy can't handle anti-bots independently during web crawling.
• No native support for JavaScript rendering

💲 Pricing:

Scrapy is entirely free.

You might also want to check out Scrapy alternatives.

3. Node Crawler: Free Web Crawling Tool for Node.js

Language: Node.js | GitHub: 6.7k+ stars

Node Crawler (Crawler) is an open-source Node.js crawling library that uses Cheerio as a parser under the hood. It offers advanced crawling features, such as priority queueing, configurable pool size, retries, rate limit control, duplicate control, and more.

With Node Crawler, you can also define a pre-request function to execute specific actions before the crawling process. These include setting headers, cookies, authentication, and more.

👍 Pros

• Free crawling tool.
• Simple learning curve.
• Advanced crawling features.
• It's lightweight and requires minimal memory.

👎 Cons

• No built-in feature to handle JavaScript rendering.
• It's prone to anti-bot detection.

💲 Pricing:

Node Crawler is free.

4. Crawlee: Free Web Crawling Tool for Node.js and Python

Language: Python, Node.js | GitHub: 15.7k+ stars

Crawlee is a web crawling tool that supports Node.js and Python. It integrates with headless browser automation libraries like Playwright, allowing you to mimic human behavior through JavaScript execution and scrape dynamic content.

This library includes a built-in proxy management feature, enabling you to queue multiple proxy server addresses and rotate them per request. Its autoscaling feature lets you specify the number of parallel requests to enforce crawl limits.

👍 Pros:

• Supports parallel crawling.
• Built-in autoscaling feature.
• Support for Python and Node.js environments.
• Seamless integration with headless browsers.
• Built-in proxy queuing. 
• Built-in session management.

👎 Cons:

• It has a steep learning curve.
• Advanced anti-bot measures may detect it.

💲 Pricing:

Crawlee is free.

5. HTTrack: Free No-Code Crawling Tool for Copying Websites

Language: Python | GitHub: 3.6k+ stars

HTTrack is an open-source and free web crawler that lets you download an entire website to your PC through its user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI). The tool preserves the website's folder structure and files, including images, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and more.

HTTrack supports proxy configuration, allowing users to route traffic through alternative IPs, which can help avoid restrictions and optimize download speed. Although not designed for high-performance, large-scale crawling, HTTrack is easy to use and an excellent choice for creating no-code website mirrors, especially for static sites.

👍 Pros:

• Suitable for mirroring and downloading websites locally.
• Multilingual Windows and Linux/Unix interface.
• Proxy support for routing requests through alternative IPs.
• Suitable for non-coders.

👎 Cons:

• Doesn't offer anti-bot bypass features.
• Unsuitable for large-scale crawling.

💲 Pricing:

HTTrack is a free web crawling tool.

6. Apache Nutch: Best for Distributed Web Crawling 

Language: Java | GitHub: 2.9k+ stars

Apache Nutch is a scalable web crawler framework that supports various data extraction activities. Although you can customize it for smaller crawling jobs, Nutch excels in batch processing massive amounts of data, making it one of the most scalable freeware options for many businesses.

Nutch supports Hadoop and HBase, enabling you to execute distributed web crawling and manage large amounts of data. Unlike Scrapy, Apache Nutch has a steeper learning curve. However, it's suitable for crawling processes involving indexing and searching.

👍 Pros:

• One of the most scalable free web crawling tools.
• High crawling accuracy.
• Excellent multi-depth crawling capabilities.
• Includes built-in support for distributed web crawling tools.

👎 Cons:

• High memory space and CPU usage during crawling.
• Steep learning curve.

💲 Pricing:

It is a completely free crawling tool.

In addition to ZenRows, a top-rated commercial web crawling tool, we've covered the top 5 open-source crawling tools so far. Let's now explore the other commercially available tools.

7. ParseHub: No-Code Scheduled Crawling

Language: No-code

ParseHub is a web crawling software capable of scraping dynamic web pages. This tool uses a point-and-click mechanism and requires no coding knowledge.

This website crawling tool uses machine learning to identify complex web pages and generate output files in various formats, including CSV, XLSX and JSON. It's available as a desktop app and supports macOS, Windows and Linux.

👍 Pros:

• ParseHub can export scraped data in multiple formats.
• Capable of analyzing, assessing, and transforming web content into useful data.
• Supports IP rotation, scheduled crawling, API, and webhooks.
• No coding skills are required.

👎 Cons:

• The ParseHub scraping process can be slow during high-volume scraping.
• Unsuitable for scraping heavily protected websites.

💲 Pricing:

ParseHub offers a free basic plan, with premium plans starting at $189.

8. Zyte (Formerly Scrapinghub): Crawling Tool With Scraper API

Language: Multi-language

Zyte is a cloud-based data extraction tool that offers a web scraping API for data extraction. Key features include headless browser support, residential proxies, geolocation, and more.

Zyte also provides cloud hosting for Scrapy, allowing you remote access to your crawler. It features a real-time dashboard to monitor and manage your web crawling activities.

👍 Pros:

• Zyte's crawling tools feature an intuitive UI.
• Excellent customer support.
• Automated proxy rotation.
• Supports headless browsers.
• Geolocation is enabled.

👎 Cons:

• Lower plans have limited bandwidth.
• Add-ons are only available in advanced plans.

💲 Pricing:

Zyte offers a free trial, with most services available on a pay-as-you-go basis. The pay-as-you-go plan starts at $0.30 and can go up to $100 per month.

Looking for Zyte alternatives? Check out our detailed guide.

9. Octoparse: No-code Tool With Dedicated Scrapers

Language: No-code

Octoparse is a no-code web crawling tool capable of scraping large amounts of data and turning it into structured spreadsheets with a few clicks. Some of its features include a point-and-click interface to crawl data, automatic IP rotation, and the ability to scrape dynamic sites.

It also features dedicated scrapers for collecting data from various websites, including social media, e-commerce, and Google.

👍 Pros:

• Easy to use.
• Beginner-friendly and requires no coding skills.
• Capable of crawling dynamic web pages.
• Includes automatic IP rotation for anti-bot bypass.
• Offers anonymous data crawling.

👎 Cons:

• Limited scalability.
• No live chat support.

💲 Pricing:

Octoparse offers a free version for small projects, with standard packages starting at $89 per month.

10. Helium Scraper: Run Chromium Browsers in Parallel

Language: No-code

Helium Scraper is a downloadable software designed for web crawling. It can smoothly extract data from various websites using off-screen Chromium web browsers. Helium Scraper can extract data in multiple formats, including CSV, Excel, XML, JSON, and SQLite.

Helium allows you to spin multiple browser instances in parallel and extract data at scale. The tool has the active selection mode feature that simplifies data extraction by identifying patterns in webpage elements. 

👍 Pros:

• Supports multiple data export formats.
• Ready-to-use templates for web crawling.
• Features an easy-to-use interface.
• Supports parallel browser instances.
• Supports SQL database.
• Supports JavaScript execution.

👎 Cons:

• Only available on Windows.
• Browser instances can be memory-demanding.
• No built-in mechanism to evade anti-bot measures.

💲 Pricing:

Helium Scraper is available for as low as $99 for a single license.

11. Dexi.io: Low-Code Crawling Bots

Language: Multi-language

Dexi.io is a cloud-based tool for crawling e-commerce sites. It has an ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) engine, allowing you to clean, restructure, and combine data from multiple sources. The collected data can be saved to cloud services, such as Google Drive and Box.net, or exported in CSV or JSON.

The platform offers custom pre-configured robots that suit your web crawling needs. You also get access to a dashboard with an alert feature to monitor your crawler bots. Although it's a low-code tool, it allows you to manage running tasks via an API.

👍 Pros:

• User-friendly interface.
• Intelligent robots automate the collection of data.
• Crawlers can be built and managed via API.
• Capable of connecting to a large variety of APIs for data integration and extraction.
• Beginner-friendly.
• ETL capabilities.
• Proxy support.

👎 Cons:

• Requires installing Dexi's custom browser, which can take up extra disk space.
• Cannot handle advanced anti-bot measures.

💲 Pricing:

Dexi.io has a free trial, with premium plans starting from $119 a month.

Conclusion

In this article, you've seen the 11 best web crawling tools. While commercial tools typically offer pre-built web crawling and data extraction features to make the process faster with little effort, they limit customization. Open-source tools offer high customizability but require more technical expertise to set up.

Overall, it's best to consider a tool that balances customizability, ease, and efficiency. ZenRows fulfills these criteria and tops our list of the best crawling tools, offering all the features required to extract data at scale without limitations.

Sign up for ZenRows today for free—no credit card required!