⚡️ What is an Instant web data scraper and what can it do?

Instant web data scraper is an online data scraper designed for scraping data from any website. It is one of the most versatile data extraction tools available. It is an improved version of Instant Data Scraper Chrome Extension.

Feature	⚡️ Instant Web Data Scraper	Instant Data Scraper Chrome Extension
🪄 Extract data from any website by fine-tuning the input	✅	✅
📃 Handle pagination, infinite scrolling, and dynamic data loads	✅	✅
⏳ Customize delays to control and randomize the crawling speed	✅	✅
🗳 Auto detect tables or extract various data points such as descriptions, URLs, and more	✅	✅
🍪 Navigate complex web pages with advanced options such as cookies and proxies	✅	❌
⬇️ Filter and scrape data to Excel and CSV	✅	✅
⬇️ Filter and scrape data to JSON, HTML, and other formats	✅	❌
🛠 Export data via API, schedule and monitor runs, set up integrations and webhooks	✅	❌
🚀 Scalable scraping	✅	❌
☁️ Cloud running, scraping setup and data storage	✅	❌

💸 Is this data scraper free?

Yes. Apify provides you with $5 free usage credits every month on the Apify Free plan, so with Instant Web Scraper you can scrape hundreds of results for free within those limits. This makes it one of the best customizable free data scraping tools available on the market.

🌩 What website data can this data scraper extract?

Thanks to the versatility of Instant Web Scraper, it can extract any details from web pages if you set it up right. You can extract any publicly available data, including but not limited to:

📱 Names and links	📝 Descriptions	⭐ Ratings and reviews
📈 User counts	⬇️ Number of downloads	🔗 URLs
💵 Prices	📸 Images and logos	🗓️ Last updated dates
🌐 Website URLs	📍 Addresses	📧 Email addresses

🧑‍💻 Why scrape data from websites?

Instant Web Data Scraper is very versatile and can turn into any specific web scraping tool you want. Using this data scraping tool, you can:

• Build a price scraping tool and track product prices and item availability
• Make an online data scraper to monitor competitors and their updates
• Build a web contact scraper and extract contact information for lead generation
• Create a product scraper and collect reviews and user feedback
• Turn data scraper into a Google scraping tool to monitor positions by keywords
• Automate data extraction for complex workflows, in general

🔧 How to use Instant Data Scraper?

No need to hunt for data from the websites manually; the Actor will do the heavy lifting. You can scrape data from web pages in just ten steps with this data scraping program:

1. Find Instant Web Scraper in Apify Store and click the Try for free button.
2. Enter the URL of the webpage you want to scrape and select the 'Find tables' action to identify tabular data.
3. Run the Actor and review the output dataset.
4. Note the 'table number' and 'column numbers' of the data points to be scraped.
5. Define your data extraction preferences in the "Column mappings" section.
6. Enter the noted 'table number' from the previous run.
7. Find the next page button selector from the target web page and enter it.
8. Choose the 'Scrape data' action and run the Actor again.
9. Optionally, pass cookies and set proxies if needed for advanced scraping scenarios.
10. Preview and download your dataset in JSON, XML, CSV, Excel, or HTML, or export it via API.

⬇️ Input

To scrape data, the input for this Instant Web Scraper should be URLs and data point selectors. You can input data by filling out fields, using JSON, or programmatically via an API. For a full explanation of input in JSON, see the input tab.

⬆️ Output sample

The results will be wrapped into a dataset which you can find in the Output tab. Here are two example datasets:

1. Scraping Wordpress directory

Input

1{
2    "action": "scrapeData",
3    "additionalColumns": false,
4    "maxDelay": 3,
5    "minDelay": 2,
6    "tableNumber": 1,
7    "nextPageSelector": ".next.page-numbers",
8    "columnMappings": [
9        {
10            "key": "name",
11            "value": "2"
12        },
13        {
14            "key": "link",
15            "value": "0"
16        },
17        {
18            "key": "ratings",
19            "value": "4"
20        },
21        {
22            "key": "authorName",
23            "value": "8"
24        },
25        {
26            "key": "usersCount",
27            "value": "9"
28        },
29        {
30            "key": "description",
31            "value": "6"
32        },
33        {
34            "key": "lastUpdated",
35            "value": "11"
36        },
37        {
38            "key": "pluginLogo",
39            "value": "1"
40        }
41    ],
42    "url": "https://wordpress.org/plugins/?plugin_business_model=commercial"
43}

Output data

1[
2	{
3		"name": "Elementor Website Builder – More than Just a Page Builder",
4		"link": "https://wordpress.org/plugins/elementor/",
5		"ratings": "6,586 total ratings",
6		"authorName": "Elementor.com",
7		"usersCount": "5+ million active installations",
8		"description": "The Elementor Website Builder has it all: drag and drop page builder, pixel perfect design,…",
9		"lastUpdated": "Updated 4 days ago",
10		"pluginLogo": "https://ps.w.org/elementor/assets/icon.svg?rev=2597493"
11	},
12	{
13		"name": "Yoast SEO",
14		"link": "https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/",
15		"ratings": "27,595 total ratings",
16		"authorName": "Team Yoast",
17		"usersCount": "5+ million active installations",
18		"description": "Improve your WordPress SEO: Write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress site using…",
19		"lastUpdated": "Updated 2 days ago",
20		"pluginLogo": "https://ps.w.org/wordpress-seo/assets/icon.svg?rev=2363699"
21	}
22]

You can preview all the fields in the Storage tab and choose the format in which to export the data you've extracted: JSON, CSV, Excel, or HTML table.

2. Scraping Apify Store

Input

1{
2    "action": "scrapePage",
3    "additionalColumns": false,
4    "maxDelay": 3,
5    "minDelay": 2,
6    "tableNumber": 1,
7    "nextPageSelector": "button.data-tracking-actor-pagination-button-next-store-web",
8    "columnMappings": [
9        {
10            "key": "name",
11            "value": "2"
12        },
13        {
14            "key": "description",
15            "value": "4"
16        },
17        {
18            "key": "userName",
19            "value": "5"
20        },
21        {
22            "key": "usersCount",
23            "value": "8"
24        },
25        {
26            "key": "price",
27            "value": "7"
28        },
29        {
30            "key": "iconUrl",
31            "value": "1"
32        },
33        {
34            "key": "authorPicture",
35            "value": "6"
36        }
37    ],
38    "url": "https://apify.com/store"
39}

Output data

1[
2	{
3		"name": "Web Scraper",
4		"description": "Crawls arbitrary websites using the Chrome browser and extracts data from pages using a provided JavaScript code. The actor supports both recursive crawling and lists of URLs and automatically manages concurrency for maximum performance. This is Apify's basic tool for web crawling and scraping.",
5		"userName": "Apify",
6		"usersCount": "46.5k",
7		"price": "Free",
8		"iconUrl": "https://images.apifyusercontent.com/J6UV1Nvv0A5RpAIUBaSPN_eBye_lDVpBYyoTg5Jl03I/rs:fill:76:76/aHR0cHM6Ly9hcGlmeS1pbWFnZS11cGxvYWRzLXByb2QuczMuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9tb0pSTFJjODVBaXRBcnBOTi9abjh2YldUaWthN2FuQ1FNbi1TRC0wMi0wMi5wbmc.webp",
9		"authorPicture": "https://images.apifyusercontent.com/FMPBaWpQ77oz0xJB2epDbiEacNO524JpP0IGc63WUdg/rs:fill:32:32/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWFnZXMuYXBpZnl1c2VyY29udGVudC5jb20vUmZ6Z3ZXZW1WSjM3VHU3SnJnQjhBRjhmdk9PUVZNWTIwMVd3NnNoeGcxRS9yczpmaWxsOjMyOjMyL2FIUjBjSE02THk5aGNHbG1lUzFwYldGblpTMTFjR3h2WVdSekxYQnliMlF1Y3pNdVlXMWhlbTl1WVhkekxtTnZiUzlhYzJOTmQwWlNOVWczWlVOMFYzUjVhQzlaY1hSclVXMUZlRnB3YlUxa05tUktVUzFoY0dsbWVWOXplVzFpYjJ4ZmQyaHBkR1ZmWW1jdWNHNW4ucG5n.webp"
10	},
11	{
12		"name": "Google Search Results Scraper",
13		"description": "This Google Scraper enables you to scrape Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and extract organic and paid results, ads, queries, People Also Ask, prices, reviews, like a Google SERP API. Select country or language and extraction of custom attributes, and download your data, no coding needed.",
14		"userName": "Apify",
15		"usersCount": "34.2k",
16		"price": "Free",
17		"iconUrl": "https://images.apifyusercontent.com/aDW746gaT2abezCHdyJvcUvyfAcitg0wkspytcV8yf0/rs:fill:76:76/aHR0cHM6Ly9hcGlmeS1pbWFnZS11cGxvYWRzLXByb2QuczMuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9uRkpuZEZYQTV6akNUdXVkUC85S2pMeFlnRTRyS3ZLYnIzTS1Hb29nbGVfU2VhcmNoX1Jlc3VsdHNfU2NyYXBlci5wbmc.webp",
18		"authorPicture": "https://images.apifyusercontent.com/FMPBaWpQ77oz0xJB2epDbiEacNO524JpP0IGc63WUdg/rs:fill:32:32/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWFnZXMuYXBpZnl1c2VyY29udGVudC5jb20vUmZ6Z3ZXZW1WSjM3VHU3SnJnQjhBRjhmdk9PUVZNWTIwMVd3NnNoeGcxRS9yczpmaWxsOjMyOjMyL2FIUjBjSE02THk5aGNHbG1lUzFwYldGblpTMTFjR3h2WVdSekxYQnliMlF1Y3pNdVlXMWhlbTl1WVhkekxtTnZiUzlhYzJOTmQwWlNOVWczWlVOMFYzUjVhQzlaY1hSclVXMUZlRnB3YlUxa05tUktVUzFoY0dsbWVWOXplVzFpYjJ4ZmQyaHBkR1ZmWW1jdWNHNW4ucG5n.webp"
19	}
20]

🦾 Want more website scraping tools?

The Apify platform is always expanding with newer, more reliable, and more versatile data extraction tools, contributed by both Apify and the Community. Feel free to explore some of the following website data scrapers:

🌐 Web Scraper	🍒 Cheerio Scraper
📄 Website Content Crawler	🚀 Super Scraper API
📞 Contact Info Scraper	🔍 Page Analyzer

❓FAQ

How to scrape data from website to Excel with instant scraper tool?

1. Select the target website. Enter the URL of the website you want to scrape.
2. Identify column mappings. Use the tool’s interface to specify how to display extracted data.
3. Target next page selectors. Use the tool’s interface to automate swiping through the pages of the website.
4. Add proxies, cookies or customize wait time, additionally.
5. Run the scraper. Start the scraping process and wait for the tool to collect the data.
6. Export the data. Download the extracted data in your preferred format (CSV, JSON, Excel, etc.).

Can I extract website data to Google Sheets?

Yes. Thanks to integrations on the Apify platform, Instant Data Scraper can be connected with almost any cloud service or web app. You can integrate your scraped databases with Google Drive, but also Zapier, Slack, Make, Airbyte, GitHub, LangChain, and more.

Is it legal to extract public data from websites?

It depends what data you're scraping. Personal data such as names, for instance, is protected by GDPR in the European Union and by other regulations around the world. You should not scrape personal data unless you have a legitimate reason to do so. If you're unsure whether your reason is legitimate, consult your lawyers. We also recommend that you read our blog post: Is web scraping legal?

Can I use Instant Web Scraper as its web scraping API?

Yes, you can use the Apify API to access Instant Web Scraper programmatically. The API allows you to manage, schedule, and run Apify Actors, access datasets, monitor performance, get results, create and update Actor versions, and more.

To access the API using Node.js or Python, you can use the apify-client in NPM package or PyPI package. There are also API endpoints available for extracting website data without a client. For detailed information and code examples, see the API tab or refer to the Apify API documentation.

Your feedback

We’re always working on improving the performance of our tools. If you’ve got any technical feedback for Instant Web Data Scraper or found a bug, please create an issue on the Issues tab.