Diffbot Overview & Top 5 Alternatives in 2023

Data, as the raw-material of our century, occupies a crucial place for businesses wishing to make it to the top.  Diffbot offers a range of data extraction solutions that cater to the needs of different sizes of businesses. Choosing the right tool for your data extraction needs is important for businesses. It’s essential to have a robust web scraping tool to extract data effectively. Diffbot stands out with its AI-driven approach in creating structured data for businesses. 

In the competitive landscape, depending on the user’s needs, alternatives may offer complementary or preferable solutions. For example, technical teams can leverage proxy services and handle data structuring tasks themselves to save costs compared to working with Diffbot.  

In this article, we will examine these alternatives to Diffbot.

Diffbot alternatives’ comparison

Vendors	Free Trial	Pay as you go	Number of Reviews & Ratings*	Avarage Score
Bright Data	7 days	✅	221	4.7
Smartproxy	14 day money-back	For residential & mobile	40	4.4
Oxylabs	7 days	✅	58	4.5
Diffbot	10K free credits for 2 weeks	✖	38	4.2
IPRoyal	7-days (only for companies)	For residential & mobile	26	4.3
Netnut	7 days	✖	6	4.7

*Numbers are based on the total number of reviews and average ratings on major review platforms of Capterra, G2, and TrustRadius. Average scores are aggregated on a 5 point scal

Vendors are sorted based on the total number of reviews they received. The sponsored products are listed at the top and have links to their websites.

Vendor selection criteria

The given criteria below are fulfilled by the vendors in the comparison list:

• Number of reviews: 5+ total reviews on Capterra, G2, and TrustRadius.
• Average rating: 4.0+/5 on Capterra G2 and TrustRadius.

Diffbot overview

Diffbot leads with advanced machine learning and computer vision technologies, providing public APIs that can extract data from web pages. Essentially, Diffbot employs sophisticated algorithms that crawl the web, pull out important information from various online sources like articles and forums. These algorithms are designed to then structure and transform the collected data into organized formats.

Key features & solutions

Diffbot’s platform offers a range of features designed to enhance the way organizations access and utilize online data:

Features:

• Knowledge graphs: 
  • One of distinguishing capabilities Diffbot offers is its ability to create knowledge graphs. These graphs are formed through high-level web scraping that collects structured data from web sources, such as profiles, product listings, and articles. The information is then categorized into a network of entities and their interrelations—for example, mapping a company as an entity to its founders and related news via relationships.
  • The knowledge graphs offer semantic insight, discerning the context and linkages among data fragments. As new information emerges and as the web grows, Diffbot’s system persistently scans and refreshes the knowledge graph, allowing users and developers to access updated data through its APIs.
• Diffbot offers Crawlbot, an automated solution for extensive web crawling tasks. Users can configure this tool to scour whole websites and compile data using automatic or finu-tuned APIs.
• Diffbot scraping service can capture images, videos, and intricate discussions from different sectors, showcasing its broad data extraction capabilities.

Other areas where the company’s products can be used can be listed as follows:

• Data cleaning: Through the Knowledge Graph, businesses can eliminate errors, outdated information, and typographical mistakes. See Figure 1:

Source: Diffbot.¹

• Sentiment tracking: Through Diffbot’s sentiment analysis, businesses can quantify trends, and see comments and words about a company, brand, or industry. See Figure 2:

Source: Diffbot.²

• Multi lingual & modal query: Diffbot allows businesses to query for image types across the web, specific entities and across languages to build datasets.
• NLP: Businesses can utilize Diffbot’s natural language processing into their application or access data from Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph to fine-tune their own machine learning model. See Figure 3:

Source: Diffbot.³

Tracking products: Diffbot allows businesses to monitor all of the places their product is sold online, see how it’s priced and whether it’s in stock, and detect unauthorized selling. See Figure 4:

,

Source: Diffbot.⁴

Diffbot pros & cons

Pros:

• Integration: 3+ reviewers claimed that the integration of the product was easy and simple, which can allow customers to focus on their businesses.⁵
  
• Technical accuracy: 3+ reviewers suggest that Diffbot offers high technical resources and accurate support especially on APIs.⁶

Cons:

• Query language: 3+ users report that Diffbot’s own query language (DQL) can be difficult and time consuming to learn.⁷
• Diffbot can have difficulties in recognizing PDF documents.⁸
• Detecting data on problematic pages. Customers point out to the issue that Diffbot can have trouble detecting data in pages using advanced  bot blocking techniques.⁹

Diffbot pricing

Diffbot pricing options are listed below in detail:

Plan	Starting Price/mo	Product Access	Usage & Features	Support
Plus	$299	-Extract -25 crawls -Knowledge graph research	-API access -1M credits -Dashboard access	-Email
Startup	$899	-Extract -Datacenter proxies -Third party proxies -Knowledge graph research	-API access -250k credits -Dashboard access	-Email
Enterprise	Custom	-Extract -Third party proxies -100+ crawls -Knowledge graph research -Third party proxies	-API access -Custom credit -Dashboard access	-Email -Custom SLA

Apart from pricing packages for businesses, Diffbot charges customers also based on entities. For credit prices, see Figure 5:

Source: Diffbot. ¹⁰

Diffbot alternatives:

1- Smartproxy

Smartproxy includes over 65 million+ proxy IPs, consisting of residential, mobile, ISP, and shared or dedicated datacenter proxies. Further, Smartproxy presents various data collection tools, including no-code scraping solutions and APIs tailored for specific tasks like eCommerce, search engine results page (SERP), and social media data extraction.

Scraping solutions

• Social media scraping API
• SERP scraping API
• eCommerce scraping API
• Web scraping API
• No-code scraper (Figure 6)

Source: Smartproxy. ¹¹

Features

• No-code scraper API allows users to extract data without specific coding expertise.
• eCommerce Scraping API combines 65M+ residential, mobile, and datacenter proxies and in-built web scraper, and data parser. Users also have freedom to choose custom domains.
• SERP scraping API can bring you ad, search, shopping search, shopping product, and shopping pricing data in HTML or JSON.
• Range of proxy options: Provides a comprehensive range of proxy options, including mobile, residential and datacenter.
• Extensive IP pool: 55+ million IPs.
• Datacenter proxies: 400K+ shared and dedicated datacenter IPs in the US.
• Geographical coverage: Covers 195+ locations .
• Supports protocols of HTTPS and SOCKS5.
• Mobile proxies: Offers 10M+ rotating 3G/4G/5G mobile IPs and 700 ASNs.
• Allows users to change their IP addresses with each new connection to a website or maintain the same IP for durations of 1, 10, or 30 minutes.

Pricing

• 14-day money-back option.
• Offers pay as you go and monthly subscription plans.

2- Bright Data

Bright Data stands as a comprehensive data collection platform that provides a variety of web scraping tools including proxies, scraping APIs, and datasets. These tools are designed to cater to an array of applications that span from straightforward web scraping to intricate market research.The provider, initially known for its residential IPs, has expanded its services into a diverse proxy network.

Their portfolio includes web scraping services and functionalities that are designed to meet the distinct requirements of data collection projects. Bright Data commands a substantial proxy repository that covers multiple countries and cities across the globe. This extensive pool of proxies minimizes the likelihood of encountering IP bans while facilitating granular, location-specific web scraping tasks.

Scraping solutions

• Scraping Browser
• Web Scraper IDE
• SERP API
• Web Unlocker

Features

• Scraping browser combine 3 features: proxy tech, automated unblocking & browser functions
• Bright Data’s web scraper offers ready-made javascript functions along with features such as pre-made web-scraper templates and built-in debug tools.
• Web Unlocker allows users to overcome browsing limitations with automated features like browser fingerprinting, CAPTCHA solving, IP rotations, request retries.
• Scraping browser offers features of proxy rotation and cooling, CAPTCHA solving, browser fingerprinting and automatic retries.
• Range of proxies, including datacenter, mobile, and residential.
• Allows Javascript rendering capabilities.
• Supports HTTP(S) and SOCKS5 protocols.
• Provides city, ASN and zip code level targeting.
• Allows for extended-use peers, enabling you to keep the same residential IP for a prolonged duration.

Pricing

• The cost is determined by the cumulative data traffic via the proxy service.
• Provides a 7-day trial at no cost for proxy and web scraping tools.
• Features a pay-as-you-go option for all proxy types, web unlocker, web Scraper IDEs, and SERP API.

4- Oxylabs

Oxylas is a proxy provider presenting an array of proxy servers including residential, datacenter options (shared, private, and rotating), as well as ISP (both rotating and static), SOCKS5, and mobile proxies. For data scraping needs, Oxylabs provides specialized services like Google search API and e-commerce scraper APIs. These can be enhanced with their “Web Unblocker Plan,” which employs artificial intelligence and adaptive HTML parsing techniques to circumvent CAPTCHAs.

Features

• Available proxy types include residential (both static and rotating), mobile, datacenter (shared and dedicated), ISP (rotating), and SOCKS5 proxies.
• Provides automated rotation for residential and datacenter proxies.
• Compatible with HTTP, HTTPS, and SOCKS5 protocols.
• Permits users to whitelist specific IP addresses for direct access to the proxy pool.
• Configured to rotate residential IPs automatically, with a standard session time defaulting to 10 minutes, and the option to set a new IP address at intervals as short as 60 seconds.
• Enables city-level targeting for precise location access.

Pricing

• Company offers a 7-day free trial.
• Oxylabs offers pay-as-you-go and subscription models for mobile and residential proxies with refunds available exclusively for subscription plans.

3-Octoparse

Octoparse offers code-free scraping solutions, enabling the extraction of web data that is then hosted on their cloud servers. This data can be exported in various structured formats, including Excel, JSON, CSV, HTML, and can be directly integrated into systems, websites, and applications through their API. 

Features

• Octoparse’s solutions include handling login-authentication, automatic IP rotation, and resolving reCaptcha programmatically.
• Octoparse is cloud-based.
• API access: The Octoparse API facilitates authorized clients in interfacing with and retrieving data from the Octoparse platform. It acts as an intermediary, relaying the client’s connection requests to the web server for data access and acquisition.
• Data can be extracted and exported in various formats such as CSV, text and HTML.
• Scheduled automation. You can set up data scraping to occur at regular intervals—monthly, weekly, daily, or at any custom frequency—ensuring your data remains current at all times.

Pricing

• For detailed information on different plans Octoparse offers, see Figure 7 below:

Source: Octoparse. ¹²

5- NetNut

NetNut, is a proxy service provider. They offer data harvesting needs with a range of mobile, datacenter, ISP, and residential proxies. Only recently, NetNut expanded its suite with data scraper tools like Unblocker, SERP Scraper API, and Social Scraper, optimizing data collection by integrating ISP and P2P networks for superior performance. The dynamic nature of rotating residential proxies minimizes the likelihood of being blocked by target websites, rendering it highly effective for data mining, particularly for extensive web scraping operations.

Scraper API solutions:

• SERP scraper API
• E-commerce scraper API
• Real-estate scraper API
• Web scraper API

Features: 

• Java script rendering.
• You can get data as parsed, a set of HTMLs, or a list of URLs.
• You have the option to customize your web crawling by employing filters and scraping parameters, including regular expressions, proxy geographical location, storage options for results. 
• Custom parser offers XPath and CSS selectors.
• Unblocker can be used in auto-rotating, CAPTCHA-solving and dynamic fingerprinting
• Unblocker can mimic authentic user behavior with real devices and evade concealed pitfalls (honeypots) on websites.
• Provides an extensive network with 52 million rotating residential IPs,1M static residential IPs and 250K mobile IPs 
• Compatibility with multiple protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, and SOCKS5.

Pricing

• Provides a 7-day free trial for new users to assess services.
• Subscription plans are flexible, with both monthly and annual billing options available.

Transparency statement

AIMultiple serves numerous emerging tech companies, including Bright Data and  Smartproxy.

Further reading

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External links

1. “Dirty Data?”. Retrieved on November 7, 2023. 
2. “Track the sentiment”. Retrieved on November 7, 2023. 
3. “State of the Art NLP”. Retrieved on November 7, 2023. 
4. “Mine User Reviews”. Retrieved on November 7, 2023. 
5. “Diffbot reviews”. G2. Retrieved on November 7, 2023. 
6. “Diffbot Reviews”. G2. Retrieved on November 7, 2023. 
7. “Diffbot reviews”. G2. Retrieved on November 7, 2023. 
8. “Diffbot reviews”. G2. Retrieved on November 7, 2023. 
9. “Diffbot Reviews”. G2. Retrieved on November 7, 2023. 
10. “Plans & Pricing”. Retrieved on November 7, 2023. 
11. “How does No-Code Scraper work?”. Retrieved on November 7, 2023. 
12. “Octoparse Premium Pricing & Packaging”. Retrieved on November 7 2023.