If you are looking for cloud-based web scrapers or crawlers, you might have heard of both Scrapin80Legsghub and TeraCrawler.io.
While many products in this domain might look more or less the same, but the ideal use case might vary tremendously.
Here are some of the differences between the 2.
The main use case
TeraCrawler is ideal when you just need to download a large amount of data regularly and be able to set rules like crawling depth, URL patterns to download or block, and the types of files/documents you need to download.
Generally, what you will get as an output is a big fat file that you can download and process locally at your convenience.
80Legs is ideal when you want to crawl and scrape data. It's ideal when you know exactly what you want and want the crawling and scraping to be done on the cloud for final consumption.
Who is it for?
TeraCrawler is ideal for developers who would like to have control over how they scrape the data but dont want to deal with the setting up and monitoring of resources and pitfalls of the crawling of the data.
80Legs is ideally for end customers who are not developers who just want the data in exportable in various formats like CSV, JSON, with the data already extracted. Or for developers who dont want to deal with both crawling as well as scraping and dont mind giving up the control.
Company focus
TeraCrawler is in the business of crawling data efficiently, quickly, predictably, and at scale for developers who deal with the problem of large scale web crawling. Its a fully automated SAAS offering for both mid-market to enterprise-grade customers.
80Legs' focus is on extracting data. 80legs supports its own custom coding framework that you can use to query data and extract pieces you want for final consumption.
Features comparison
80Legs can crawl a large number of URLs, get HTML, Text, and data like Emails and Phone numbers. It can also download files like images and PDFs.
Teracrawler is focused on the speed of crawling and can all of the above things. Additionally, it uses proxy IP rotation behind the scenes using the Proxies API infrastructure to get data that is difficult to access. It also is unique in the ability to render javascript based content so you can crawl AJAX-based websites. The reporting of the progress is slightly better, allows for three download formats. With data extraction, TeraCrawler has inbuilt support for boilerplate removal, article type text extraction, and even summary extraction.
