Both let you build scrapers without code. Crawley Cloud adds a full REST API, a CLI, scheduling with concurrency units, data-quality validation and a free tier to start.
Octoparse and Crawley Cloud solve the same problem — getting structured data out of websites without writing a scraper by hand — and both start from a point-and-click picker. The difference is what happens after the first extraction: where the scraper runs, how you get the data out, and what it costs once you have more than a couple of jobs.
Octoparse is a desktop application first (Windows and macOS) with cloud extraction on its paid tiers. Crawley Cloud is cloud-only: every scraper is built in the browser, runs on our workers, and is reachable through a REST API and a CLI from the first project.
| Crawley Cloud | Octoparse | |
|---|---|---|
| No-code point-and-click | Yes | Yes |
| REST API + CLI | Yes — full API, OpenAPI & crawley CLI | Limited |
| JavaScript rendering | Yes | Yes |
| Scheduling & concurrency units | Yes | Yes (paid tiers) |
| Data validation & anomaly alerts | Yes | No |
| Free tier | Yes, no credit card | Limited trial |
If you extract data occasionally from your own machine and never need to call the scraper from code, Octoparse's desktop workflow is comfortable: install it, click through a site, export a spreadsheet. Its library of pre-built templates for large consumer sites is also broader than ours.
Teams standardised on a Windows tooling stack, or who want to keep extraction local for policy reasons, will find the desktop model a better fit.
The moment scraping becomes a pipeline rather than a task, the cloud-first design pays off. Every project exposes its items over the REST API (with an OpenAPI spec), the crawley CLI scripts runs and exports, and deliveries push results to S3, a webhook, Slack or email when a run finishes — without a desktop app staying open.
Data quality is built in: field triggers alert you when a value changes, drop-percentage alerts catch a partially broken run before it silently poisons your dataset, and cross-run de-duplication keeps a canonical table instead of appending the same rows every night. JavaScript rendering and proxies are included in every plan, not sold separately.
Octoparse sells monthly subscription tiers; cloud extraction, higher concurrency and API access live on the upper tiers, so the price of the workflow you actually want is the tier that unlocks it. Check their pricing page for current numbers.
Crawley Cloud: Free (no credit card) · Starter $9/mo · Pro $29/mo · Scale $79/mo · Business $199/mo — flat monthly plans sized by concurrency units and retention, every feature in every plan. The free tier is a real tier, not a trial: one project, scheduled runs, the API and exports, for as long as you like.
Rebuild each task as a Crawley scraper with the visual picker (a typical listing page takes a few minutes), run it once, and compare the item count against your last Octoparse export. Then move the schedule over and point your downstream tooling at the API or an auto-export. Most teams run both side by side for a week and switch the schedule off in Octoparse when the counts match.
No. Scrapers are built and run in the browser; the optional CLI is a single binary for automation.
Yes — JS rendering and rotating proxies are included in every plan, including Free.
Yes. The full REST API and the CLI work on Free; paid plans add concurrency units, retention and team seats.
Pick Octoparse for occasional, local, one-off extractions. Pick Crawley Cloud when the data has to arrive somewhere on a schedule, through an API, with checks that tell you when a site changed.
Bring your scrapers to a platform with a real API and transparent pricing.
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