Web Scraper vs. API: Which one to choose for data extraction?

It’s a tough choice because either way you go, you lose something. Web scraper is excellent for flexibility and interactivity, but it's a little slow and can be troublesome when the data source updates or is taken down. API has a much faster turnaround time and an endless data archive, but there are limited options on what you can extract from the API due to its design constraints. So which one should you choose?

Web Scraper and APIs are web data extraction tools. Web scraping is generally used for research and data collection, while APIs are more apt for business use cases. Before deciding which option to choose, it is important to understand what each option offers.

What is a web scraper, anyway?

A web scraper is a script that scrapes data from a site, saves it to external storage, re-scrapes the same or different page on the same site, and stores it in external storage. That’s pretty much it. As you can see, web scrapers are pretty straightforward in operation. You have to know how to program one and have experience in web scraping because there’s no general “how-to-scrape” guide that can give you all the answers. In other words, you will get the hang of it only if you do a lot of practice, and the more experience you get, the better your scraper gets.

Data scraping vs. API

Analyzing the pros and cons of a web crawler vs. web scraping, we’ve found that web scrapers win in terms of flexibility. API restricts the data that can be extracted from it, which may or may not be a good thing depending on your situation.

For example, let’s say you want to extract data from your customer database to organize it based on employee name. With API, you can only extract the data for employees with a specific department name. You probably don’t want all your customers’ email addresses and password reset ids uploaded to the cloud (if you have an API). So what do you do? You scrape them by hand! Just note that scraping by hand is slower than web scraping, so if speed is most important, go with web scraper.

And the good news is that you can use web scraping to gain insight into other data. If you know how to scrape, you can use it for marketing purposes by scraping data from your competitors’ websites and extracting valuable information from them. You can analyze the data you’ve scraped and visualize if you have programming skills and knowledge.

The bottom line is that if speed is your top priority, go with a web scraper.

Why might you want to use a web scraper?

Speed and interactivity:

You’re used to scraping sites manually or with the help of other applications like PHP, but their speed and interactivity are often inferior to what you’re used to with websites like eBay or Amazon. Web scrapers enable you to interact with websites in real-time, allowing you to scrape more pages simultaneously with less delay between requests.

You’re used to scraping sites manually or with the help of other applications, but their speed and interactivity are often inferior to what you’re used to with websites. Web scrapers enable you to interact with websites in real-time, allowing you to scrape more pages simultaneously with less delay between requests.

Extensibility:

You can also add features that your web scraper didn't initially have, such as external back-end support (databases, complex data processing, etc.), and use it for other automated tasks.

Infinite archive:

Whether the site you’re scraping is a well-designed and maintained application or simply a collection of poorly coded websites with bad SEO, and you can scrape all of them with the same web scraper.