Tutorials to make your website a 24 hr marketing machine
Tutorials to make your website a 24 hr marketing machine
Browse AI Review
The internet provides a wealth of information. However, gathering information, arranging it in a spreadsheet, and getting insights from it can be a daunting process. Instead, using a tool like Browse AI can save you valuable time and resources.
Browse AI is a no-code software that extracts website data and monitors website changes. Browse AI is unique from other online scraping tools because of its friendly user interface (the cute robot) and easy point-and-click feature that makes it easy to get started.
In this post, we will go through some of the most important features of Browse AI and its pros, cons, pricing, and alternatives.
Browse AI Overview
Browse AI is a powerful web data scraping tool that lets you extract data from any website. It provides easy steps to scrape data easily without touching a line of code automatically and saves you hours of time.
The tool offers a number of prebuilt robots to extract data from certain websites for job info, competitive analysis, real estate data collection, social media marketing, and SEO. In fact, Browse AI has prebuilt data extraction robots for 35+ such sites.
If the prebuilt robots don’t work for you, you can create your own scraping recipes. You can train the robot to capture the product list, text, and screenshots from any website you want.
It lets you capture the title, description, link, categories, or any other entity present for each list item. Basically, once you do it, the robot will emulate your actions and scrape other similar data from the page repetitively.
Moreover, Browse AI also monitors changes in websites, LinkedIn, Google Maps, Google organic searches, and Google places information and provides alerts for any changes made.
The data extracted from scraping are stored in the Browse AI’s cloud server which you can download to CSV or export them to Google Sheets. In addition, you can also integrate Browse AI with other third-party apps like Zapier, Airtable, Pabbly Connect, etc.
Besides, Browse AI is capable of solving captchas, searching based on geolocation, extracting data behind login restrictions pages, IP rotation, and scheduling scrapes for robust data scraping.
Browse AI Features
Let’s see the features of Browse AI in detail.
1. Prebuilt Robots
One of the reasons Browse AI simplifies scraping data is due to its prebuilt scraping robots. It provides several built-in scraping recipes to collect data from specific sites. And the robots are built to address the popular use cases.
To be exact, Browse AI offers 50+ prebuilt data scraping robots for the collection of several data types from 35+ sites. Plus, there are 4 robots for monitoring Google results and company info on LinkedIn.
You can collect product information from Amazon or ProductHunt product lists, extract job information from LinkedIn, extract property details from Realtor, and much more.
Not only that, you can carry out one-click data extraction from popular sites including Yelp, Indeed, Upwork, Redfin, RemoteOk, WordPress, Medium, Hotels.com, etc.
2. Custom Scraping Recipes
The premade scraping robots might not work for you in case you want to scrape other websites or collect custom data. Thus, Browse AI lets you create custom robots to extract data from any website.
You can even go through and scrape data from the page that requires logging in, with the help of session cookies.
Basically, you can extract lists and text, or even take screenshots of pages from any URL you want. And within the list, you can capture any available information like product link, image URL, price, description, and so on with point-and-click.
Browse AI will store every action on the page on the cloud and turn them into repeatable steps. So, you can run them again on demand any time you want.
Furthermore, you can also create APIs and run the scraping tasks remotely by integrating with other apps.
3. Website Monitoring
Besides web scraping, Browse AI also lets you monitor websites and pages websites. You can either do it with a custom URL or get the available prebuilt monitoring robots.
The prebuilt robots offer 4 monitoring options – company info on LinkedIn, Google Map search results, organic Google search results, and Google place information.
For custom monitoring, you can add any website URL that you want to keep your eye on. Browse AI lets you select any element on the URL including list, text, image URL, and alt texts to monitor. It even lets you take page screenshots of the page to see changes.
In the above example, we have created a robot that monitors the pricing changes of Stackable.
To run the robots on automation, you can also set a schedule at desired frequency and time. You can also opt to get notified through emails if the changes are detected.
4. High Scraping Conversion
For some scrapers, it’s the end of the line if the page is password-protected or requires solving captchas. But not with Browse AI – it offers several robust mechanisms to go past them.
Browse AI intelligently detects most text-based captchas and resolves them. But still, some sites use advanced captchas which can be harder to solve.
When it comes to login pages, the robots can also scrape the data behind login pages. It offers using login cookie-sharing option or encrypted login details to get access to the website quickly.
Some sites you want to scrape might be blocking your IP. For those cases, Browse AI deploys IP rotation automatically in the background to surpass the IP block.
5. Adaptation to Layout Changes
A site under your scraping routine could change its layout/UI. So, this might be an issue regarding how the bots will identify the elements to scrape.
But, that’s not an issue with Browse AI because it uses 100s of selectors to identify the elements you previously interacted with or selected for scraping.
Thus, there’s a minimal need of making adjustments and maintenance in the scraping recipe.
6. Integration
Hexomatic offers a number of integrations for several purposes like running scraping on automation, saving the data to other platforms, or connecting and exporting data to several third-party apps.
Here are the integrations offered by Browse AI.
- Google Sheets
- Zapier
- Webhooks
- Rest API
- Airtable
- Pabbly Connect
- Make.com
- Workflows
- Integrately
Browse AI Pricing
Browse AI is a freemium tool that offers both paid and free options.
With the forever free plan, you get 100 credits per month, limited robots, integrations, and a scraping schedule. It’s okay to start off with the free plan to get a hang of it.
You can upgrade to any of the premium plans if you need additional credits and frequent checks. Here’s the yearly pricing and plans overview of the premium plans with their contrasting features.
Starter: $39 per month | 24,000 credits per year | 10 robots | 1 hour checks | 40 days retention | 1 user
Professional: $99 per month | 60,000 credits per year | 30 robots | 15 minutes checks | 70 days retention | 1 user
Company: $249 per month | 120,000 credits per year | unlimited robots | 5 minutes checks | 70 days retention | 5 users
Enterprise: Custom pricing | custom credits | unlimited robots | 1 minutes check | unlimited retention | unlimited users | premium support
Browse AI Pros and Cons
Now, here are some of the pros and cons of Browse AI.
Pros
- Extremely easy to use
- Offers a forever-free plan
- Lots of prebuilt automation robots
- Monitors sites for changes
- Lets you create custom scraping recipes
- Offers custom extraction scheduling
- Solves captcha automatically
- Works with pages protected with login
- Provides IP rotation to bypass IP blocking
Cons
- The free plan is limited.
- No workflow automation
- May not solve advanced captchas.
Browse AI Alternatives
Browse AI is a great scraping automation tool, but it might not be the best option every time. So, here are some alternatives to Browse AI that might be applicable to you.
1. Hexomatic
Hexomatic is one of the most powerful web scraping tools and data collection tools. It saves you time for tasks like researching and data collection, useful for agencies, eCommerce businesses, affiliate marketers, and
It lets you create custom recipes for capturing any information from any website with point and click method – no codes involved.
Not only that, Hexomatic offers automation modules with which you can treat the collected data to convert them to meaningful information, sending to other platforms, analyze pages, convert them to other forms, and so on.
Compared to Browse AI, Hexomatic is not useful for scraping social media platforms. And it doesn’t offer a forever free plan, but only a limited free trial of the premium.
2. Octoparse
Octoparse is a user-friendly web scraping tool that allows you to collect data from any website and store it in your database without requiring any coding skills. With its simple point-and-click extraction process and scheduling option, you can easily scrape any page and import data into spreadsheets.
Octoparse can scrape various website elements within infinite scrolls, gated pages, dropdown menus, and AJAX elements. Its IP rotation feature is a useful tool for preventing your IP address from being blocked while scraping.
However, it’s worth noting that Octoparse does not let you monitor websites for changes as in Browse AI and prebuilt robots for popular data extraction use cases.
3. Web Scraper
Web Scraper (Webscraper.io) is a point-and-click data scraping tool that enables capturing important data from any website for data collection, research, and marketing.
It offers a browser extension to carry out the scraping tasks easily and export them to CSV files. And it can handle any modern website containing JS, AJAX, paginations, and scrolls.
You can also scrape the websites on the Web Scraper cloud for more robust data collection. With features like scheduling, IP rotating, APIs, and webhooks, collecting and managing data become easy.
Compared to Browse AI, Web Scraper doesn’t offer prebuilt robots and website monitoring features. And the pricing is a little high considering the features it offers.
Conclusion
With Browse AI, you can collect essential data for your business with just a point and click. The prebuilt robots are available for popular and frequent use cases, however, you can create your own scraping robots.
Browse AI can even enter and capture data from pages that require logging in, filling captchas, or blocking your IP to make sure scraping any website you want.
Thus, it could be the best solution to look for an easy-to-use, powerful, and cost-effective website scraping and monitoring tool.