Scrapingdog Review

Scrapingdog is a web scraping API that can help you scrape any website. They have millions of proxies in their proxy pool that help scrape websites with rate-limiting walls at scale. Scrapingdog uses a Google Chrome instance to bypass the Cloudflare protection shield.

It also supports scraping websites(for example myntra.com) through JS rendering. By default, they use JS rendering but you can turn it off and make a normal HTTP GET request using &dynamic=false. This will result in faster data delivery. I found their documentation very flexible, code snippets are available in almost every coding language, and you can just copy and paste the code into your file. Let’s talk about the features Scrapingdog has to offer in a little detail.

Web Scraping Tool

They offer a web scraping tool that is available on the dashboard, using this tool you can scrape any website by just pasting your target URL inside the target link box. You can even select the type of proxies you want to use and the nature of the GET request. You can make normal GET requests as well as render JS through headless chrome.

After scraping you can even copy and deliver the data you got in response.

JS Rendering

Websites like myntra.com loads target data after loading the HTML code. Its JS code makes some API calls that return data in JSON or XML form and then later it renders the data on the screen. Websites like these cannot be scraped through a simple HTTP GET request. To scrape this Scrapingdog uses a real instance of Google Chrome to load and scrape the data from the website completely. If a website takes some extra time to load then you can even use the wait feature provided by Scrapingdog. This will help you to load the website on Chrome before returning the scraped results.

Proxy

Scrapingdog offers both Datacenter and Residential proxies. You can use it for Ad verification, private browsing, SEO monitoring, Data collection, etc.

Success Rate Tracking

You can even track your success rate over any domain you scrape using their “Log Activity” page on the dashboard.

This kind of transparency helps you to take timely decisions. I think they are the only one in the proxy API market that offers a success tracker.

Custom Scrapers

Scrapingdog also provides dedicated APIs for Google and Linkedin.

• You can scrape google by just passing a query and the page number. If you want to try directly from the tool then they have a dedicated page for that too on their dashboard.

• You can scrape the Linkedin person profiles as well as the company profile. API is pretty fast and you can scrape almost 3 million profiles per day. That is just amazing!

You can test their APIs directly from the dashboard without even going through their documentation. That speeds up your testing.

Pricing

I found their pricing to be in the mid-range, not too expensive, and not too cheap. They offer a decent discount if your volume is high, you can mail them and they can create a custom package for you. On top of that, you get a money-back guarantee if you are not happy with the service and your usage is below 20%. You can subscribe and can cancel it anytime you want.

For new users, they also offer generous 1000 free API calls. You can try all the features Scrapingdog has to offer in this free pack and then you can upgrade to the plan that fits your needs.

Support

Their customer support is available 24*7 to resolve any queries you might have regarding the product. They even helped me create a custom code snippet for amazon.com which involved price and rating scraping. By the way, I got almost 99% success rate with their APIs while scraping amazon which is next to amazing.

Final Verdict

Scrapingdog is overall a great product and goes above my expectations. The success rate they deliver is beyond amazing. Before this, I was using Brightdata for scraping amazon but the success rate was close to 90%, which is not bad, but with Scrapingdog I am getting almost 99% and they cost much lower than Brightdata. Their rate of response is also better than most in the market. So, the team has done tremendous work in creating such a great Web Scraping API.

The only thing which I don’t like about Scrapingdog is they do not offer JS rendering in the LITE pack, which according to me they should. Apart from that, it is a fantastic product. I will rate this 4.5 out of 5.