Choose: Proxies or Scraper APIs?

If you operate a business, you are undoubtedly well aware of the growing significance of data scraping and collection. Proxies or scraper APIs are good options for scraping data, both with their pros and cons. So, let’s find out more about these two data scraping options.

Today, data scraping is a crucial tool for acquiring powerful and valuable data. Big data can offer real value to a wide range of corporations. From price comparison data to contact information for new customers, data collection methods can be beneficial to organizations.

Proxies or Scraper APIs?

Proxies and scraping APIs are both web scraping solutions. However, there are some distinctions between the two. Proxy servers act as middlemen between the internet and users. In addition, it changes the user’s IP address to redirect the user’s request and allows the safe scraping of data from any website. 

The primary goal of scraping APIs, on the other hand, is to deliver the request to the provider and receive a response from the user. A proxy allows a user to scrape data from a website. API scraping enables users to extract data from multiple, more accessible sources other than e-commerce websites and search engines.

Scraping with Proxies

Proxy Benefits

Increased dependability and decreased blockage. Because various target websites have different methods of preventing web scraping, proxies assist in getting around these preventions and allowing the user to crawl websites more reliably by lowering the risk of being blocked or banned.

Getting around geo-restrictions. Since proxy servers allow you to access forbidden content in certain areas, they are the best choice for scraping product information from online stores.

Consistency. Proxy servers allow you to send repeated requests to the destination website, unlike APIs that limit the number of requests.

Best Proxies for Scraping

This is our shortlist of the best proxy providers for web scraping jobs. For more in-depth review, read The Best Proxy Services for Web Scraping.

Bright Data

Bright Data provides a wide selection of residential proxy servers. The starting plan is $500 and includes up to 40 GB of data. However, if you wish to use more, the package available for $1000 permits you to utilize up to 100 GB.

With over 72 million rotating residential IPs from all over the globe and a 99.9% network uptime, Bright Data is without a doubt the best place to acquire proxies for web scraping.

Smartproxy

Smartproxy rates are based on traffic consumption. Exceeding the limit will incur a fee for each extra GB. Please keep in mind that the membership is automatically renewed, so if you wish to discontinue using the service, you must deactivate it manually.

It charges less than all of its major competitors despite offering the same tools under the hood. Prices start at $75 / 1 GB and go up to $3,000 / 1 TB for the Enterprise plan.

Stormproxies

Stormproxies offers just 70,000 proxies, no meaningful control panel, minimal configuration choices, and you can’t even target the nation. However, the firm has carved out a comfy niche with a surprisingly dedicated fan base. 

There will be no effort to persuade you to use Storm Proxies if you are just a short-term scraper, sneaker copper, Instagram account admin, or Pokemon hunter. The highest price is $300. Other providers have their lowest prices higher than this. Add some well-placed advertising here and there, as well as word of mouth, and the popularity of StormProxy begins to make sense.

Scraping with APIs

Are you still wondering what to choose? Proxies or scraper APIs? Let’s see the latter’s benefits and some of the best options on the market.

APIs Benefits

Cost-efficient. If what you obtain from a website’s public APIs is sufficient for your business needs, using APIs is less expensive than employing proxies.

Easy to use. It is possible to modify your web scraper to gather consistent data without using proxies if your target website has an API. 

Best APIs for Scraping

Apify

Apify is capable of connecting to virtually any online app or cloud service. You can use it if you want to analyze action findings to better understand the data, if you want to be alerted to important changes on websites, or if you want to import new contacts into your CRM.

You can retrieve the actors’ source code from a Git repository, GitHub Gist, Zip file, or push it from a local workstation. Your actors’ code may be changed online in a syntax-highlighting editor. From your Apify app, you can easily manage, develop, and operate actors.

Scraper API

Scraper API is a proxy API that enables online page scraping. This service is currently among the best on the market for proxy APIs. This API can automatically handle proxies and CAPTCHA. You may retrieve the HTML of any website with a single API request.

The Scraper API offers clients a large 40M+ residential IP address pool to choose from, as well as unlimited bandwidth, making it one of the most popular brands for online scraping.

What to Choose?

Proxies or scraper APIs? Proxies are a preferable choice for larger, more established businesses that have their scraping infrastructure and resources. Residential and datacenter proxy servers are better than web scraping APIs since you can select the scraping targets of your choice.

If your business is small, and you do not have the resources to acquire residential proxy servers, scraper APIs are a better choice for developing your business and staying competitive.

Web Scraping for Small Businesses

Nobody can deny that data has emerged as one of the most valuable assets in today’s world. Every business, large or small, must be aware of its rivals, public opinion, demand, market position, and much more.

Smaller businesses, understandably, have fewer resources and a smaller staff. To succeed in a competitive market, though, you must investigate a variety of options. For this, I recommend Oxylabs‘ Real-Time Crawler.

Through this tool, you can get reliable data from search engines and e-commerce sites. Also, you collect structured data in JSON from a list of ready-to-use data APIs. It reduces web scraping expenses by only charging for successful delivery.

Conclusion

Whether you require proxies or a scraper API is determined by your resources and business requirements. Proxies are a better choice if you have a scraping solution, programming knowledge, or staff available to manage the scrapers.

We hope you now understand the distinctions between web scraping using proxies or scraper APIs. The basic principles presented in this post can be applied to help you make a decision. Check out our recommendations before making your decision.