Crawly
Capture, filter, and search data from millions of websites in various formats, with intuitive and powerful capabilities.
What is Crawly?
Crawly is a web scraping tool built by Diffbot that lets you extract, filter, and search structured data from websites at scale. Rather than building custom scrapers for each site, Crawly provides a visual interface to define what data you want to capture, then applies those rules across multiple websites. It handles the technical complexities of web scraping, including JavaScript rendering and data extraction, so you can focus on the data itself. The tool is useful for researchers, analysts, and business teams who need to gather information from public web sources without writing code.
Key Features
Visual data extraction rules
Define what to capture without coding by selecting elements on web pages
Multi-site scraping
Apply extraction rules across many websites simultaneously
Data filtering
Sort and filter extracted results based on specific criteria
Multiple export formats
Download data as CSV, JSON, or other structured formats
Search functionality
Query and search through extracted datasets directly
JavaScript rendering
Handles modern websites that load content dynamically
Pros & Cons
Advantages
- No coding required; visual interface makes web scraping accessible to non-technical users
- Efficient at handling large-scale data collection from multiple sources
- Structured output makes data immediately usable for analysis or integration
- Freemium model lets you test the tool before committing to paid plans
Limitations
- Website structure changes can break extraction rules, requiring manual updates
- Some websites prohibit scraping in their terms of service; you're responsible for compliance
- Complex multi-step workflows or heavy JavaScript sites may require technical support
Use Cases
Competitive price monitoring across retail websites
Gathering job listings or company information for recruitment research
Collecting news articles or content from multiple news sources
Building datasets of product information for market analysis
Monitoring real estate listings or property data across listing sites