OctoparseReviews of octoparse.com

They tried to pay me to write a 5-star review. After gotten help with a support question they wrote this in the chat: "We are currently inviting users to write a 5-star review for us on Trust Pilot, and as a thank you, you can receive an extra 15 days on your Basic Plan. Would you be interested in this offer?" I was very offended that they tried to do this to manipulate their TrustPilot score. A serious company with a great product would not need to do this. A clear red flag. When it comes to the product I think it is an OK product, definitely not great. There are things that cause friction when doing even simple webscraping. It easily mess up and I would have thought by now that it would be "smarter" and find the right data even if there are some small deviations between pages. Whenever you work with loops it get tricky very fast and pagination is not very intuitive. You have to learn by trial and error and make adjustments often. It is way to 'sensitive' and error-prone and I rarely get all the data I need.

Might be "easy" for an IT guy but I spent several hours trying to scrape one basic site without success. Any support is for paying customers. If I could have had any success I would have subscribed

I just tried Octoparse and it seems to not meet expectations. It seems that it allows me to login or even autologin using precreated cookies and navigate through the website until I reach the page that I need to extract data. However once I reach there I cannot easily identify all the elements of a list and I cannot create a kind of tree structure. Because extracted data need to be like so: Items in a list extract all items from the list Visit each item of the list Get all subitems of the item Extract all short descriptions of the subitems Click each subitem to expand the drawer on the right Extract all information from this drawer It seems that octoparse has an issue helping you build this nested logic

I cannot even get started with the product. Very buggy, terrible UX.