Zyte

Very useful when you want to host your scapers

Aspetti positivi:

Did the Job I wanted it to do for me.... Which is host and test your scraper that runs in the background. Before Zyte, I had to run the script inside my terminal and that killed my battery

Aspetti negativi:

Getting started wasn't as smooth as I'm used to with services like Vercel. The user experience using vercel makes you feel like you are using a premium, top tier service. I didn't feel that when I used Zyte. Part of the reason is the UI, but there are a lot of other aspects like the snappiness and speed of the website. It took quite some time to test out my implementation. I would need to wait for some time for the build to complete to try running the web scraper again

Best data extraction & automated proxy service

Commenti: We chose Zyte after testing all leading proxy and data extraction solutions on the web. The service is extremely reliable, rapidly scalable and has the lowest latency amongst its peers. Support teams are extremely responsive even on weekends and we've never been let down.

Aspetti positivi:

- Reliable & consistent (highest uptime) - Lowest latency - Lowest resolution errors - Excellent customer support

Aspetti negativi:

- Pricing can be improved - IP availability in non-US locations can be improved

no way to control your spending

Aspetti positivi:

wasting my money and getting ripped off by zyte

Aspetti negativi:

They advertise a feature to set a spending limit, but there is no option. I contacted support, sent a screenshot, they said there is no spending limit without a subscription. The entire system is designed to steal your money. I woke up yesterday to a bill 40x times more than what was expected. Support is unhelpful and they don't care, they just want to steal your money. Zyte is designed to be misleading.

Making life easier

Aspetti positivi:

Our team being in limited number, setting up multiple tools for data extraction was a pain. We contacted an agency which quoted us a huge bill and that's when we found the Zyte. Few days spent in dev, no pain of servers, proxy rotation or anything and we got our job done.

Aspetti negativi:

We're happy with the product and do not find any issues yet.

When it just works

Commenti: It makes me work really fast but still secure for my clients. I look really professional even though what I did was only suggesting and installing Crawlera. It's awesome!

Aspetti positivi:

It really saves my time as a web scraping specialists. I always need rotated proxies for my client needs. I keep creating a new project and it is a lot of hassle of I have to buy proxies, renew proxies, and create proxy rotation on my own. I am glad I don't even need to think about it. It just works!

Aspetti negativi:

Well, it's just doesn't have enough advanced documentation on Scrapy Splash combined with Crawlera. Their development team in Github is very responsive though.

Poor experience with customer service

Aspetti positivi:

We were managed to find better alternatives

Aspetti negativi:

Overall very poor customer service which for a software like this is a must

Relatively Easy To Use

Commenti: Our company, whatoplay.com, aggregates data from multiple sources around the world. Since we started using Crawlera, we haven't really encountered big issues. Our common ones in the last 6 months is just reaching our limit, so we just had to increase our plan.

Aspetti positivi:

We're only using Crawlera for our data scraping needs and it has worked seamlessly since we started using it in 2016. When we had to upgrade to a higher limit, the transition was fast, and no dev time was wasted updating our existing codebase.

Aspetti negativi:

Pricing can be a bit tricky especially if your need is right in between the plans.

K-LIX

Commenti: I have a good experience with scrappinhumb, in a matter of minutes I can develop and publish a new spider.

Aspetti positivi:

The software delivers the exactly promised result. It has a friendly interface and an efficient support.

Aspetti negativi:

You need a roadmap of new features and the pricing of third-party services.

Amazing product - can't get any better for speedy data mining

Commenti: Overall experience with them has been stellar, I will likely be a customer for life.

Aspetti positivi:

I like scalability. Sometimes we need to submit millions of requests immediately and with Scrapinghub we can really put the pedal to the metal. We rarely have downtime, and it's really allowed us to grow our company and thrive. Easy to integrate into scrapy and other python tools.

Aspetti negativi:

Their billing support can be moody, but the product is fantastic!!

Why do you need that title?

Commenti: I use and recommend that platform for years for my customers which need production-ready enterprise-grade data scraping systems.

Aspetti positivi:

- Original and flexible technology - No vendor-lock - Easy to use for professionals - Pretty convenient API system for integration with third-party solutions

Aspetti negativi:

- Not so easy to use by non-professional IT person that still wants to use data scraping - Lack of ability to create some kind of simple and clear user interface for such a persons - No simple solution for distributed/high-volume crawling - Lack of monitoring and alerting, non convenient logging system - Overpriced Crawlera

Product extraction

Aspetti positivi:

It is easy to use and the quality of the data is good

Aspetti negativi:

It could be a little faster but for our needs it is a good product

Great tool

Aspetti positivi:

It’s an easy to use tool, and it gets the job done without much hassle.

Aspetti negativi:

I have No dislikes about this product. It is great.

Zyte platform review

Commenti: Overall had a great experience using zyte.

Aspetti positivi:

Able to deploy my scrapers and also to debug using logs it's very helpful.

Aspetti negativi:

It's pretty confusing sometimes while scheduling jobs as the timezone is in UTC. Even debugging logs gets harder.

Simple, reliable and powerful service

Commenti: Never had a problem, and customer services always replied to our requests promptly, and with attention to detail.

Aspetti positivi:

We are very happy with Crawlera. It works like a charm with our Scrapy projects, just adding a few lines of code we completely forgot about proxies that ended up failing anyway.

Aspetti negativi:

Some requests end up being very slow, but good news is most of them end up going through.

Overall 10

Commenti: Started using it 2 years ago, learning curve totally rely on the framework because the cloud platform is pretty intuitive, self explanatory and easy to use.
Whenever I needed support I have been response fast and with a favorable solution.

Aspetti positivi:

A full integrated platform for a framework well done for it purpose. Easy to use, based on others frameworks structure, so if you are used to web development in python then it's a piece of cake to create spiders. The integration (scrapy + scrapinghub) its really good, from a simple deployment through a library or a docker makes it suitable for any need. Good support and constant improvement on the platform. A lot of plugins and, open to any feature needed.

Aspetti negativi:

So far there is nothing I dislike about it.

Still leading on a more competitive space

Commenti: It just works, except on cloudflare protected sites, you will need to add more expensive services or tricks. Tech support is very helpful and keep improving with new services.

Aspetti positivi:

Their cloud proxy service, combined with scrapy is still a just-works, with ip rotation from different geolocations.

Aspetti negativi:

Their other offers are expensive, even with the increasing competition. It needs a lot of work for many sites using cloud flare protection.

scrapy review

Commenti: Scrapinghub has enabled us to streamline the scraping process for our company and sets the foundation for future scaling. I like the fact that scrapyhub handles the "Ops" part of scraping like provisioning cloud resources, staging data, and rotating IP addresses.

Aspetti positivi:

Scrapy is amazing, python api is easy to use, job dashboard is easy to understand, good documentation and code.

Aspetti negativi:

Dynamic pages sometimes hard to scrape, nothing wrong with lua (for splash) as a language, but can be minor barrier to entry for python/javascript users.

I love Crawlera

Commenti: I am very happy with Scrapinghub. Whenever I need to run a small scraper that I can't run on my laptop (since I don't leave it turned on 24/7), I just run it on Scrapy Cloud. Meanwhile, Crawlera is just the best!

Aspetti positivi:

I have been using Scrapy and Scrapinghub's services since 2013 and I'm so far very satisfied with their services. Crawlera, their proxy service, works very well! I don't have to setup a proxy farm anymore or configure my scrapers to point to thousands of proxy services as they do all the grunt work for you (it's all automated).

Aspetti negativi:

Minor hiccups from time to time on the dashboard. It only affects me when I want to see historical stats but this problem doesn't affect functionality.

Scrapinghub allows me to do things other proxy servers don't do.

Commenti: Scrapinghub gives my business higher quality raw data so my clients get better results.

Aspetti positivi:

This software allows me to access 97% of the web resources I need. Other proxy servers I have used gave me 75% maximum.

Aspetti negativi:

That its a time based subscription. I would prefer being able to buy a certain number of requests and renew when those run out.

Great proxy and scraping utils with superb support

Aspetti positivi:

I use the crawlera proxy system from Scarpinghub. It is very straightforward to use and results are great.

Aspetti negativi:

No cons until now. Once in a while a server/IP gets banned but they have a big pool of IPs to serve you.

They don't promise what they sell.

Commenti: I bought a $ 349 Advanced plan to get 200 concurrent requests. In their free trial, the response times are very low - about a few seconds. After purchasing the plan instead the requests together applied a delay on purpose thus canceling the potential of concurrent requests. In fact, it's like doing about 5/6 per second.
After contacting their technical support, after a week, they tell me that an upgrade is required by paying an additional cost. Obviously I requested a refund since they did not promise what was advertised and told me that it was not possible since I had used the service. Of course I had used it, otherwise how could I tell that concurrent requests weren't working properly?
I absolutely do not recommend this service for making me waste about a week to find a "fake" problem they know well and for asking me for an upgrade without even offering me a courtesy refund to apologize.

Aspetti positivi:

Ease of installation and integration with API

Aspetti negativi:

They don't respect what they communicate in the service.

Scrapinghub

Aspetti positivi:

I use the Python scrapy module to write crawlers to monitor competitors prices. The integration with Github makes it real easy to deploy code to the hub. The dashboards are very useful to monitor progress and schedule jobs. Really happy with this offering.

Aspetti negativi:

In the beginning it was somewhat cumbersome to automate data extraction. Once I started using Python scrapinghub module life became easy. So also a pro!

Shub Review

Commenti: From what I've used (basic spiders) it has been great, the page is really easy to use and the cli makes deploying easy.

Aspetti positivi:

Open source, well documented and very efficient.

Aspetti negativi:

Splash needs to be migrated to another tool IMO. I don't find LUA easy to work with as a developer; not because of the language but debugging and maintaining code is really hard. If you use scrapy-splash there is a black box that cannot interact with. I think going mainstream with javascript or python whilst unifying browser scrapping and scrapy itself would be an amazing decision. So, overall I would love to see a merge between scrapy and a browser scraper.

Worst thing I have ever used in my Software Engineering career

Aspetti positivi:

No pros - its a library full of bugs

Aspetti negativi:

*** NEVER USE THIS CRAP LIBRARY *** We had a paid plan, and this Splash is full of bugs Proxies for HTTPS urls do not work at all, the splash page just hangs forever There is no real-time UI that you can look whats happening inside Splash We created few tickets about the errors we were getting, they respond after 10+ days for a single ticket When taking screenshots, it generates white blank screenshots even the page is loaded perfectly When clicking on elements, it sometimes works, but sometimes just makes that element 'active' but does not click When selecting an element, it sometimes finds element, but sometimes does not, even though the source-code of page has that element when I print that in logs

Fantastic If You Know How To Use It

Commenti: Portia aside, I highly recommend this platform. It's cheap and works really well. If you know how to use Scrapy, this is easier than launching a bunch of VMs, etc. and relatively inexpensive. I knock Portia because I wanted it to work, and it will with A LOT of patience, but, if you know your way around Python and Scrapy, this is the scraping cloud platform for you! Again, there technical support has been great for me. Most of my issues have been stupid mistakes by me, but they are happy to help in a reasonable time frame (usually under 24 hours/ under 8 hours in my experience).

Aspetti positivi:

- Works perfectly as long as you do not need Portia - Fast - Many available features in one place - It fulfills my scraping needs well - EXCELLENT technical support

Aspetti negativi:

- Portia (beta) is almost unusable. I got a couple very basic programs out of it before I taught myself how to use Scrapy. Still, if you are looking for a value and have time to deal with the lag/hiccups in Portia, it is by far the best value for a simple point and click scrapying platform that I found. You can make it work, you will just want to put your head through the screen before you are done...