No-Code Web Scrapers: The Easiest Pick and How to Add Proxies to Octoparse

Browse AI is the easiest for someone who can't program: you teach it by example on the page itself, and it needs no install, no selectors and no card to start.

Why it is the easiest:

• No code and no setup: it runs in the cloud from your browser; there is nothing to install.
• Teach by example: paste a URL and pick a list, text or a screenshot; the AI proposes the fields, and you rename or drop them.
• Or start from a ready robot: Browse AI lists 200+ prebuilt robots, such as "Scrape Google Search Results" and a sitemap URL extractor, so for common sites there is nothing to teach.
• Logins handled: for data you are entitled to, you give the robot your credentials or session cookies, which Browse AI says it encrypts and uses only when the robot runs.
• No proxy setup: Browse AI says it handles rate limiting, IP rotation and retries itself ("Skip the proxy configurations, and rotating IPs"), and its free plan lists residential proxies.
• Spreadsheet export: CSV, Google Sheets or Airtable, with a rerun on a schedule (hourly at the fastest on the free plan).
• A free plan with no credit card: 50 credits a month on 2 websites, with unlimited robots.

Browse AI's capabilities as stated on its Extract page and its plan limits as on its pricing page.

The catch: the free plan stops at about 500 rows a month, one run may last up to 60 minutes, and data is kept for 90 days; "premium" sites cost 2 to 10 credits per run. Sites with strong anti-bot protection can still fail in any no-code tool. Paid plans start at $19 a month billed annually, or $48 billed monthly (Browse AI pricing page).

Runner-up: Octoparse. Its free plan is larger (10 tasks and 50,000 exported rows a month), but it is a desktop app with its own task editor, workflow steps and run settings, so a complete beginner takes longer to learn it, and free runs happen on your own computer. Its free plan also caps each export at 10,000 rows and allows 2 concurrent runs on 1 device; paid plans start at $69 a month billed annually (Octoparse pricing).

Pick by the job, not by the feature list:

• You can't program and want data on a schedule: Browse AI.
• You want one table from one page, now: Instant Data Scraper.
• You want many pages, run on your own PC: Octoparse.

Free plans as published on each vendor's pricing page; check them again before you build on a plan.

What happens at the free limit. Browse AI's 50 credits a month are about 500 rows on most sites (1 credit = 10 rows or one screenshot), on up to 2 websites. When they run out, the robots wait for next month's credits or a paid plan. Octoparse's free plan stops at 10 tasks and 50,000 exported rows a month.

Start here: your first Browse AI robot

Before you rely on any tool, run it on one small public page and check the first 20 rows by hand. More free options, including Google Sheets: free web scrapers and open-source tools.

A no-code web scraper, also called a visual or point-and-click scraper, is a tool that builds a scraper from your clicks. You open a page inside the tool, click an example of each field, and the tool works out the pattern, for example "every product card's title and price", and applies it to every item on the page. It then follows the "next" button or the links to detail pages, and saves the results as a table.

Under the hood it does what a coded scraper does: it requests pages, renders them in a built-in browser, selects fields with generated CSS selectors or XPath, and stores the rows. The difference is that the tool writes and runs that logic for you.

1. Open the page in the app or extension.
2. Click the first item's fields. The tool highlights similar elements and builds the list.
3. Set pagination: click the "next" button, or set a scroll for infinite pages.
4. Optionally open detail pages: click an item's link and select the fields on its page.
5. Run in the browser, on your computer, or in the vendor's cloud.
6. Export to CSV, Excel, JSON or Google Sheets, or send the data on through an integration.
7. Schedule the run, in apps that offer it, to refresh the data daily or weekly.

Spreadsheet methods are covered in how to scrape data from a website into Excel, and code-based tools in best web scraping tools.

Check these points against your real target pages, on the free plan if the app has one:

1. Does it render JavaScript? Open your target's page source: if the data is missing there, the tool needs a built-in browser.
2. Pagination and detail pages: "next" buttons, infinite scroll, and clicking into each item.
3. Scheduling: daily or hourly runs without your computer on.
4. Exports and integrations: CSV, Excel, JSON, Google Sheets, webhooks or an API to fetch results.
5. Proxy support: can you add your own proxies, and does the form take a username and password or only IP:port?
6. Limits and pricing: how credits, pages, runs, tasks or concurrent jobs are counted, and what happens at the limit.
7. Maintenance: how easy it is to re-select fields when the site changes its layout.
8. Logins: whether it can fill a login form or reuse a session, if the data you are entitled to sits behind one.

Turn on Octoparse's built-in residential proxies, billed per GB of page-loading traffic from Octoparse credits (about 500 pages per GB), for cloud or local runs; or enter your own HTTP proxies as IP:port lines, without a username or password, for local runs only. The built-in route in 7 steps:

1. Open the task and click Task Settings.
2. Go to Anti-blocking.
3. Tick Access website via proxies.
4. Click Use Octoparse proxies.
5. Choose Default (IPs from random countries) or a Country/Region.
6. Set the Rotate time.
7. Click Save in the upper left.

You need Octoparse 8.6.8 or later and at least $3 in credits (Add Credits). Octoparse says 1 GB usually scrapes about 500 pages, that proxy credits cannot be refunded, that there is no unlimited proxy subscription, and that its proxies may not work on every page, so top up a small amount and test first (Octoparse: Set up IP proxies, updated 2026-07-30).

The two routes side by side:

A proxy for the Octoparse login only: if your company network blocks outside requests, Octoparse's login screen has its own proxy setting. Open the login settings, choose Manual proxy configurations, enter the IP and port, test the connection and confirm. It applies only while you sign in to Octoparse, not to task editing or scraping, and it also takes no username or password.

Your own proxies (ProxyField): Octoparse takes them only as HTTP IP:port lines without a username or password, on local runs, so you authenticate by IP, not by login:

1. Allowlist your computer's IP. In your ProxyField dashboard, add the public IP of the computer that runs Octoparse to the allowlist. The gateway then accepts that computer without a username and password.
2. Open the proxy settings. In the task, go to Task Settings → Anti-blocking and tick Access website via proxies.
3. Add the gateway. Choose Use my own proxies → Configure, enter gate.proxyfield.io:<port> as the only line, where <port> is the port you set up in the dashboard for your allowlisted IP, and click Confirm. Octoparse's examples show an IP address, such as 58.22.214.29:2318.
4. Leave rotation to the gateway. One line is enough: the gateway gives a new IP on every request, so there is no list for Rotate time to switch between.
5. Save and run locally. Click Save, then run the task on your computer; cloud runs cannot use your own proxies.
6. Use the proxy while you build, too. If the site blocks your own IP while you set up the task, click Proxy in the upper right of the task editor, choose your proxies and tick Use the same proxies for task runs.
7. Check the exit IP. Make a one-page task on https://api.ipify.org and compare the IP it extracts with your own; then run 10 pages of your real target before the full job.

The limit to know: an allowlisted IP:port line has no username, so inside Octoparse you cannot pick the exit country, city or a sticky session the way a -country-us username does; with the IP allowlist, the product, location and session are set per port in the dashboard instead. If you need a set country on Octoparse, use its built-in Country/Region option; if you need ProxyField's country, region and city targeting, use an app whose proxy form has username and password fields, and enter gate.proxyfield.io, port 7000, and a username such as <login>-country-us-city-new_york for an exit IP in New York.

A workaround for both limits: a local forwarder. A small proxy on your own computer can hold the username and password and pass the traffic on to the gateway, so Octoparse only sees a plain IP:port line. With the open-source tool GOST, whose docs show this form (-L for the local proxy, -F for the upstream one with user:pass@; GOST authentication):

gost -L http://127.0.0.1:8080 -F "http://<login>-country-us-city-new_york:<password>@gate.proxyfield.io:7000"

Then enter 127.0.0.1:8080 in Use my own proxies → Configure and run the task locally. The country, city and any session go in the -F username, a password with special characters must be URL-encoded, and the forwarder must stay open while the task runs. We have not tested this route inside Octoparse; check the exit with the one-page api.ipify.org task first.

A visual scraper is the right start for non-programmers and small recurring jobs. An API suits a team with some development skill that wants data without running infrastructure; ProxyField's web scraping API, in development, is designed to fetch any URL as plain HTTP or with JavaScript rendering, billed on successful results only (API documentation; Contact sales). Code wins at volume and on unusual sites. How the paid routes compare on cost: scraper API vs proxies.

• Layout changes break templates, and someone has to re-select the fields.
• Volume: desktop apps run on your machine and IP; cloud plans grow with credits or pages.
• Blocks: a site that limits requests per IP stops a scraper that sends everything from one address.
• Complex flows: multi-step forms, conditional logic and unusual pagination may be beyond the interface.
• Data quality checks are basic; validate the export before you rely on it.