SourceForge Reviews Scraper — Extract Every Software Review in Seconds

Turn any SourceForge product page into clean, structured review data — ratings, pros & cons, reviewer profiles, and vendor replies — with a single click. No coding required.

• ⚡ Fast — scrapes hundreds of reviews in seconds, not minutes
• 📊 Complete — every field captured: 1–5 star ratings, 5 dimension scores, pros/cons, reviewer role & company size
• 🎯 Precise — filter by date or cap the number of reviews to pay only for what you need
• 🧾 Ready to use — export to JSON, CSV, or Excel straight from Apify

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📌 What This Actor Does

This Apify Actor scrapes user reviews from SourceForge, one of the largest software review and download platforms on the web (30+ million monthly visitors). Give it one or more product URLs — for example https://sourceforge.net/software/product/pCloud/ — and it returns every review as structured data.

Who it's for:

• SaaS marketers & product managers — monitor what users say about your product and your competitors
• Market researchers & analysts — collect voice-of-customer data at scale for competitive analysis
• Data scientists — build sentiment-analysis and NLP datasets from real user feedback
• Reputation managers — track new reviews and vendor replies over time
• Developers — feed review data into dashboards, CRMs, or AI pipelines via the Apify API

No browser automation, no login, no CAPTCHA headaches — just reliable web scraping that delivers clean data every run.

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✨ Key Features

• Complete review data — title, full text (pros, cons, overall), star rating, and publish date for every review
• Rich reviewer context — name, job title, company size, user role, frequency of use, and how long they've used the software
• 5-dimension ratings — separate scores for Design, Ease of Use, Features, Pricing, and Support
• Recommendation score — the 1–10 "would recommend" probability for each review
• Vendor replies included — capture official company responses with their dates
• Product summary — product name, vendor, aggregate rating, and total review count in every result
• Smart limits — stop at a maximum review count or at a cutoff date (reviews come newest-first)
• Flexible input — paste full URLs, review-page URLs, or just the product slug (pCloud)
• Multiple products per run — scrape your whole competitive landscape in one job

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🧠 Why This Actor Is Different

• Built on SourceForge's own review feed — instead of driving a slow headless browser through bot walls, this Actor reads the same lightweight endpoint SourceForge's site uses to paginate reviews. That means runs finish in seconds, results are consistent, and there's nothing fragile to break when page styling changes.
• No proxy costs by default — most review scrapers force expensive residential proxies. This one works without any proxy in normal conditions (and still supports full proxy configuration as a safety net).
• 100% field coverage — validated against real products with every core field filled on every review: no half-empty records.
• Honest, predictable pricing — you control exactly how many reviews are scraped per run.

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⚙️ Input Configuration

Field	Type	Required	Description
startUrls	array	✅	SourceForge product pages to scrape. Full URLs or bare slugs both work.
maxReviews	integer	—	Maximum total reviews across all products. 0 = no limit (default).
targetDate	string	—	Oldest review date to include, YYYY-MM-DD. Scraping stops at the first older review.
proxyConfiguration	object	—	Optional. Usually unnecessary — enable only if requests start failing.

Example input:

{
    "startUrls": [
        { "url": "https://sourceforge.net/software/product/pCloud/" },
        { "url": "https://sourceforge.net/software/product/Slack/" }
    ],
    "maxReviews": 100,
    "targetDate": "2024-01-01"
}

Tips for best results:

• A bare slug works too: { "startUrls": ["pCloud"] } — handy for quick tests.
• Use targetDate for recurring monitoring: run weekly with the date of your last run and you'll only collect new reviews.
• The slug is the last part of the product URL and is case-sensitive — copy it directly from the SourceForge address bar.

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📤 Output Format

The Actor pushes one dataset record per product, containing the product summary and a reviews array:

{
    "name": "pCloud Business",
    "vendor": "pCloud AG",
    "productUrl": "https://sourceforge.net/software/product/pCloud/",
    "rating": 4.3,
    "reviewCount": 22,
    "reviews": [
        {
            "id": "6a23154575693400e3c4fae2",
            "url": "https://sourceforge.net/software/product/pCloud/#review-6a23154575693400e3c4fae2",
            "title": "pCloud Business: The Digital Bunker Your Team Needs",
            "rating": 5,
            "date": "2026-06-05",
            "edited": false,
            "reviewerName": "All C.",
            "reviewerTitle": "Project Analyst",
            "usedFor": "Less than 6 months",
            "frequency": "Daily",
            "userRole": "User",
            "companySize": "1 - 25",
            "dimensionRatings": {
                "design": 4,
                "ease": 5,
                "features": 5,
                "pricing": 5,
                "support": 5
            },
            "recommendProbability": 10,
            "pros": "The best thing about this platform is its impenetrable security...",
            "cons": "On the downside, it's not designed for real-time co-creation...",
            "overall": "In short, pCloud Business is a fantastic option if...",
            "body": null,
            "helpfulCount": 0,
            "reply": {
                "date": "2026-06-08",
                "text": "Thank you for such a thoughtful and well-structured review..."
            }
        }
    ]
}

Field reference:

Field	Description
name, vendor	Product name and the company behind it
rating, reviewCount	Aggregate star rating and total review count on SourceForge
reviews[].rating	Overall star rating of the review (1–5)
reviews[].date / edited	Publish date (ISO) and whether the review was later edited
reviews[].reviewerName / reviewerTitle	Reviewer's display name and job title
reviews[].usedFor / frequency / userRole / companySize	Usage context reported by the reviewer
reviews[].dimensionRatings	Per-dimension scores: design, ease, features, pricing, support (1–5)
reviews[].recommendProbability	"Would you recommend?" score, 1–10
reviews[].pros / cons / overall	The three sections of the review text
reviews[].body	Text of short reviews that have no pros/cons structure
reviews[].helpfulCount	How many users marked the review helpful
reviews[].reply	Official vendor reply (date, text) or null

Download the dataset as JSON, CSV, Excel, or XML, or pull it programmatically through the Apify API.

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▶️ How to Use

1. Open the Actor in the Apify Store and click Try for free.
2. Paste product URLs into the Product URLs field (or bare slugs like pCloud).
3. (Optional) Set Max reviews or an Oldest review date to control the scope.
4. Click Start. Runs typically finish in seconds.
5. Open the Dataset tab and export your data in the format you need.

Common workflows:

• One-off export — scrape a product's full review history in a single run.
• Competitor batch — add 5–10 competing products to startUrls and export one combined dataset.
• Scheduled monitoring — create an Apify Schedule (e.g. weekly) with targetDate set to the last run's date, and pipe new reviews to Slack, email, or your data warehouse via integrations.

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📈 Use Cases

1. Competitive intelligence — compare dimension ratings (pricing, support, ease of use) across competing products to find your market advantage.
2. Voice-of-customer analysis — mine pros and cons at scale to discover the exact language customers use, then reuse it in landing pages and ads.
3. Product roadmap input — aggregate the most common complaints (cons) about your product and your competitors to prioritize features.
4. Reputation monitoring — get alerted when new reviews appear and track whether vendors reply (and how fast).
5. AI & sentiment datasets — build labeled training data: every review ships with a numeric rating alongside its text, perfect for sentiment models.

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🛠️ Advanced Tips

• Keep runs small and frequent rather than giant and rare — combined with targetDate, you'll never re-scrape old data.
• Proxies: leave proxy off for normal use. If you ever see repeated request failures, enable the Apify proxy in proxyConfiguration — the Actor automatically rotates to a fresh IP between retries.
• Scaling: each product needs one request per 20 reviews, so even a 500-review product is only ~25 fast requests. You can safely batch dozens of products per run.
• API access: call the Actor from your own code with the Apify client (apify-client for JavaScript/Python) and read results directly from the dataset.

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❓ FAQ / Troubleshooting

Is there a free tier? Yes — free-plan users can scrape up to 100 reviews per day. Paid Apify plans have no daily cap.

The run says "Product not found (HTTP 404)". The product slug is wrong or the product page moved. Open the product on sourceforge.net and copy the URL exactly — the slug is case-sensitive.

Some products show fewer reviews than expected. Check your maxReviews and targetDate inputs — both stop scraping early by design. With maxReviews: 0 and no targetDate, the Actor collects the complete review history.

What are rating vs dimensionRatings? rating is the review's overall 1–5 stars. dimensionRatings are the reviewer's separate 1–5 scores for design, ease of use, features, pricing, and support.

Does it scrape reviews from sourceforge.net project pages (open-source downloads)? No — it targets the business software directory (sourceforge.net/software/product/...), which is where structured user reviews live.

Is scraping reviews legal? The Actor collects only publicly available data. You are responsible for using the data in compliance with applicable laws and SourceForge's terms; personal data may be subject to GDPR and similar regulations.

Can you add more fields or another review platform? Yes — send a feature request (see Support below). The same architecture powers scrapers for other review platforms.

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📞 Support

• Issues & feature requests: open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab in the Apify Console — it's monitored.
• Direct contact: me@ahmedhrid.com — include your run ID for the fastest diagnosis.

If this Actor saves you time, a ⭐ rating in the Apify Store helps others find it.