Zyte

Avantages

Did the Job I wanted it to do for me.... Which is host and test your scraper that runs in the background. Before Zyte, I had to run the script inside my terminal and that killed my battery

Inconvénients

Getting started wasn't as smooth as I'm used to with services like Vercel. The user experience using vercel makes you feel like you are using a premium, top tier service. I didn't feel that when I used Zyte. Part of the reason is the UI, but there are a lot of other aspects like the snappiness and speed of the website.

It took quite some time to test out my implementation. I would need to wait for some time for the build to complete to try running the web scraper again

Avantages

- Reliable & consistent (highest uptime)
- Lowest latency
- Lowest resolution errors
- Excellent customer support

Inconvénients

- Pricing can be improved
- IP availability in non-US locations can be improved

Avantages

wasting my money and getting ripped off by zyte

Inconvénients

They advertise a feature to set a spending limit, but there is no option. I contacted support, sent a screenshot, they said there is no spending limit without a subscription. The entire system is designed to steal your money. I woke up yesterday to a bill 40x times more than what was expected. Support is unhelpful and they don't care, they just want to steal your money. Zyte is designed to be misleading.

Avantages

Our team being in limited number, setting up multiple tools for data extraction was a pain. We contacted an agency which quoted us a huge bill and that's when we found the Zyte. Few days spent in dev, no pain of servers, proxy rotation or anything and we got our job done.

Inconvénients

We're happy with the product and do not find any issues yet.

Avantages

It really saves my time as a web scraping specialists. I always need rotated proxies for my client needs. I keep creating a new project and it is a lot of hassle of I have to buy proxies, renew proxies, and create proxy rotation on my own. I am glad I don't even need to think about it. It just works!

Inconvénients

Well, it's just doesn't have enough advanced documentation on Scrapy Splash combined with Crawlera. Their development team in Github is very responsive though.

Avantages

We're only using Crawlera for our data scraping needs and it has worked seamlessly since we started using it in 2016. When we had to upgrade to a higher limit, the transition was fast, and no dev time was wasted updating our existing codebase.

Inconvénients

Pricing can be a bit tricky especially if your need is right in between the plans.

Avantages

The software delivers the exactly promised result. It has a friendly interface and an efficient support.

Inconvénients

You need a roadmap of new features and the pricing of third-party services.

Avantages

I like scalability. Sometimes we need to submit millions of requests immediately and with Scrapinghub we can really put the pedal to the metal. We rarely have downtime, and it's really allowed us to grow our company and thrive. Easy to integrate into scrapy and other python tools.

Inconvénients

Their billing support can be moody, but the product is fantastic!!

Avantages

- Original and flexible technology
- No vendor-lock
- Easy to use for professionals
- Pretty convenient API system for integration with third-party solutions

Inconvénients

- Not so easy to use by non-professional IT person that still wants to use data scraping
- Lack of ability to create some kind of simple and clear user interface for such a persons
- No simple solution for distributed/high-volume crawling
- Lack of monitoring and alerting, non convenient logging system
- Overpriced Crawlera

Avantages

A full integrated platform for a framework well done for it purpose. Easy to use, based on others frameworks structure, so if you are used to web development in python then it's a piece of cake to create spiders.
The integration (scrapy + scrapinghub) its really good, from a simple deployment through a library or a docker makes it suitable for any need.
Good support and constant improvement on the platform.
A lot of plugins and, open to any feature needed.

Inconvénients

So far there is nothing I dislike about it.

Avantages

We were managed to find better alternatives

Inconvénients

Overall very poor customer service which for a software like this is a must

Avantages

It is easy to use and the quality of the data is good

Inconvénients

It could be a little faster but for our needs it is a good product

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Zyte

Avantages

It’s an easy to use tool, and it gets the job done without much hassle.

Inconvénients

I have No dislikes about this product. It is great.

Avantages

We are very happy with Crawlera. It works like a charm with our Scrapy projects, just adding a few lines of code we completely forgot about proxies that ended up failing anyway.

Inconvénients

Some requests end up being very slow, but good news is most of them end up going through.

Avantages

Their cloud proxy service, combined with scrapy is still a just-works, with ip rotation from different geolocations.

Inconvénients

Their other offers are expensive, even with the increasing competition. It needs a lot of work for many sites using cloud flare protection.

Avantages

Scrapy is amazing, python api is easy to use, job dashboard is easy to understand, good documentation and code.

Inconvénients

Dynamic pages sometimes hard to scrape, nothing wrong with lua (for splash) as a language, but can be minor barrier to entry for python/javascript users.

Avantages

I have been using Scrapy and Scrapinghub's services since 2013 and I'm so far very satisfied with their services. Crawlera, their proxy service, works very well! I don't have to setup a proxy farm anymore or configure my scrapers to point to thousands of proxy services as they do all the grunt work for you (it's all automated).

Inconvénients

Minor hiccups from time to time on the dashboard. It only affects me when I want to see historical stats but this problem doesn't affect functionality.

Avantages

This software allows me to access 97% of the web resources I need. Other proxy servers I have used gave me 75% maximum.

Inconvénients

That its a time based subscription. I would prefer being able to buy a certain number of requests and renew when those run out.

Avantages

I use the crawlera proxy system from Scarpinghub. It is very straightforward to use and results are great.

Inconvénients

No cons until now. Once in a while a server/IP gets banned but they have a big pool of IPs to serve you.

Avantages

Ease of installation and integration with API

Inconvénients

They don't respect what they communicate in the service.

Avantages

I use the Python scrapy module to write crawlers to monitor competitors prices. The integration with Github makes it real easy to deploy code to the hub. The dashboards are very useful to monitor progress and schedule jobs. Really happy with this offering.

Inconvénients

In the beginning it was somewhat cumbersome to automate data extraction. Once I started using Python scrapinghub module life became easy. So also a pro!

Avantages

Open source, well documented and very efficient.

Inconvénients

Splash needs to be migrated to another tool IMO. I don't find LUA easy to work with as a developer; not because of the language but debugging and maintaining code is really hard. If you use scrapy-splash there is a black box that cannot interact with. I think going mainstream with javascript or python whilst unifying browser scrapping and scrapy itself would be an amazing decision.
So, overall I would love to see a merge between scrapy and a browser scraper.

Avantages

No pros - its a library full of bugs

Inconvénients

*** NEVER USE THIS CRAP LIBRARY ***

We had a paid plan, and this Splash is full of bugs

Proxies for HTTPS urls do not work at all, the splash page just hangs forever

There is no real-time UI that you can look whats happening inside Splash

We created few tickets about the errors we were getting, they respond after 10+ days for a single ticket

When taking screenshots, it generates white blank screenshots even the page is loaded perfectly

When clicking on elements, it sometimes works, but sometimes just makes that element 'active' but does not click

When selecting an element, it sometimes finds element, but sometimes does not, even though the source-code of page has that element when I print that in logs

Avantages

- Works perfectly as long as you do not need Portia
- Fast
- Many available features in one place
- It fulfills my scraping needs well
- EXCELLENT technical support

Inconvénients

- Portia (beta) is almost unusable. I got a couple very basic programs out of it before I taught myself how to use Scrapy. Still, if you are looking for a value and have time to deal with the lag/hiccups in Portia, it is by far the best value for a simple point and click scrapying platform that I found. You can make it work, you will just want to put your head through the screen before you are done...

Avantages

We love everything about Zyte. The only flaw is that the "back end" is very closed and debugging can be difficult.

Inconvénients

Not easy to "get to details". The back end of the processing is very closed.