Free Web Scrapers and Open-Source Tools

Pick in 10 seconds: one page → Instant Data Scraper; several pages → Web Scraper; recurring → Octoparse Free; no quota and no fees → Crawl4AI, or Beautiful Soup + Requests.

Hosted no-code apps are free up to a cap; browser extensions are free without one, because they run on your computer. Figures from each vendor's pricing or comparison page; check them again before you build on a plan.

ParseHub also has a free plan; its pricing page did not load for us on 2026-10-27, so check its limits there. More no-code options: no-code web scrapers and online web scrapers.

The table lists free open-source tools by type. The licenses and star counts are as GitHub and PyPI showed them on 2026-10-23.

Every library above is free for commercial use under its license. The GPL tools are free to use too; the GPL matters only if you ship modified copies of them. On 2026-10-23, Playwright, Puppeteer, Crawl4AI and Scrapy had about 98K, 96K, 86K and 65K stars on GitHub, the most in the table.

Free for small jobs, not for scale. Open-source tools are free without a limit. Hosted free plans stop at a cap: 500 rows a month on Browse AI, 50,000 exported rows on Octoparse. On credit-based APIs, a Google page can use 25 credits, so a 1,000-credit allowance covers 40 Google pages. The second wall is blocking, and on busy sites it often comes before the cap: a free scraper sends every request from your own IP, sites rate-limit busy IPs first, and IP rotation sits in the paid tiers (Octoparse lists IP rotation and residential proxies only on paid plans).

Where each free plan runs out (check them again before you build on a plan):

The credit multiplier is the hidden part: the same allowance shrinks by 5 to 25 times on the sites people most want to scrape. ProxyField's Web Scraping API, in development, is designed without credits: $0.50 per 1,000 successful pages over plain HTTP ($0.20 from 10,000 in one purchase) and $2.00 with JS rendering ($1.00 from 10,000), billed on successful results only, whatever the site; access through Contact sales.

"Free" covers three different deals, and only one of them stays free at scale:

• Open source: the code is free under a license such as MIT, Apache-2.0 or BSD. You can use it as much as you like, commercially too. You pay only for what runs it: your computer or a server, and proxies at volume.
• Free tier: a hosted app or API gives you a monthly allowance of pages, credits or runs. Past the allowance, you pay or wait for next month.
• Trial period: full features for a few days or up to a credit amount, then a paid plan.

So the honest answer to "is it free?" depends on volume. For a few hundred pages a month, almost any option costs nothing. For hundreds of thousands, open-source code is still free, but the servers, the maintenance and the IPs are not.

Without code, three free options cover small jobs:

1. A browser extension: Instant Data Scraper detects the list on the page you are viewing and exports it to CSV or Excel. See web scraper extensions.
2. Google Sheets formulas: IMPORTHTML and IMPORTXML pull tables and values from public pages into a sheet. See how to scrape website data into Google Sheets.
3. Free tiers of no-code apps, desktop or online, for recurring jobs of limited size. See no-code web scrapers and online web scrapers.

For AI-powered options, see free AI scraping tools.

For point 3, the free plans of Octoparse and Browse AI are compared in the table above; ParseHub is another app to test.

Open-source scrapers live on GitHub, and a repository's page tells you whether the tool is safe to build on. Check these points before you depend on one:

• License: MIT, Apache-2.0 and BSD let you use the code commercially with few conditions. No license file means the author has not given you permission to reuse the code; ask first.
• Activity: recent commits and releases. Scrapers depend on browsers and sites that change every month, so an abandoned tool breaks soon.
• Issues: whether maintainers answer, and whether the open bugs touch your use.
• Documentation and examples, including how to set a proxy.
• Stars: a rough measure of how many people use it, not of quality.

Some open-source projects also give you a scraping API you host yourself: you run their server in Docker, and it exposes a "scrape this URL" endpoint for your own code or AI agents, like a hosted scraper API without the per-request bill. You run the servers and supply the IPs. For one example aimed at AI pipelines, see Crawl4AI. For practice projects to build with these tools, see web scraping projects.

To save every page of a site rather than extract fields, use a website copier. HTTrack, a free desktop app under the GPL, downloads a site's pages, images and styles and rewrites the links so you can browse the copy offline. GNU Wget does the same from the command line:

wget --mirror --convert-links --adjust-extension --page-requisites --no-parent \
     --wait=1 --random-wait https://books.toscrape.com/

--wait=1 --random-wait spaces the requests about a second apart. Copiers suit small sites and archives. They download everything, including pages you do not need, and they cannot run JavaScript. To send Wget through a proxy, see Wget proxy setup.

A free scraper becomes a paid project at four points:

Proxy traffic is the easiest of these costs to estimate: pages × average page size. A worked example, at an assumed 150 KB per HTML page:

The tier rate applies to the whole purchase, there is no subscription, and unused traffic never expires, so a small free-tool project can buy 1 GB for $2.95 and use it over months. Measure your own page size before you buy: the browser's developer tools show the transferred size of a page on the Network tab.