
Ask HN: Has anyone used web-scraping-as-a-service that didn't suck? - peteretep
I&#x27;m trying to be a little more commercially minded, and avoid writing my own scraping infrastructure and maintaining a bunch of scraping integrations for specific sites I want data from.<p>There seems to be a large number of web-scraping-as-a-service products out there, and very little to recommend between them. Has anyone used one which didn&#x27;t suck, or am I likely to need to write my own scraping tools?
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renaudg
I heard good things about [https://import.io/](https://import.io/)

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cblock811
Everyone I spoke with about Import.io said it was pretty inconsistent.

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nreece
Give Feedity - [https://feedity.com](https://feedity.com) a try. Drop us a
message [https://feedity.com/contact.aspx](https://feedity.com/contact.aspx)
if you have any questions or concerns.

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mariocesar
I got great experiences with
[http://scrapinghub.com/](http://scrapinghub.com/), you can hire them as
consultants also and short time contract is enough to get in the right
direction. really smart people

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ccarter84
Seconding this question... I've wanted a way to get HN top posts each hour,
aggregated (and deduped) by day/week, so that I dont have to feel the need to
check as often. Thanks for this links, hopefully one of these will get me
there!

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dangrossman
You don't have to scrape HN, it has an API. It's linked to at the bottom of
each page.

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TomBeckman
I've used [http://www.mozenda.com](http://www.mozenda.com) in the past. Worked
on some fairly complex Web directories with multiple levels.

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Roger_Archive
My colleagues at [https://www.archive-it.org](https://www.archive-it.org) do a
pretty darn good job

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mswen
work with a group that use Mozenda - I haven't worked much with it directly.
They made it through a couple years of scraping with Mozenda. They recently
decided to spend more and installed Kapow. More mature platform - lots of
features but also a lot more expensive if I understand correctly.

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t_liu
it depends, tools like Kimono can gather data on a topical layer, but cant
really interact with the page(via js). I wanted to scrape some data on a site
I was interested in, but I need to interact with the site to get the data, so
I ended up writing my own crawler

