In a hurry?
The best Quora scraper in 2023, as found in our independent testing, is ScraperAPI!
Quora is a commonly used website that holds a collection of questions and their answers. All the content on this website is created and posted by users.
It is Quora users who ask questions and then if some other visitor on the website knows the answer to that query, they leave an answer for it.
Web scraping is a process that makes data collection from online websites much faster than manual data collection.
Some web scrapers are dedicated to scraping data from only a particular website and others can be customized to retrieve data from any webpage.
Here is a list of Quora scrapers that can be used to scrape publicly available data from Quora.
Best Quora Scrapers 2023
Here’s a quick look at the best Quora scrapers:
- ScraperAPI – 🏆 Winner!
- Apify
- Bright Data
- ScrapingBee
- Octoparse
- ParseHub
- ScrapeStorm
- WebHarvy
1. ScraperAPI
Scraper API is an easier way to collect publicly available data from websites such as Quora in a structured format.
You will need to send the URL for the page that you need to scrape to the Quora scraper API along with an API key.
It will in turn come back with a response from the online page that you want to scrape.
Without an automated process, scraping data from websites can take months and years.
This work is shrinked to a matter of mere seconds and minutes with web scraping options.
2. Apify
The most attractive feature for Apify is that it offers a free account that is fully functional. Along with this they also provide a $5 credit each month.
The Apify Store hosts a lot of readymade web scrapers that are dedicated to specific websites but there isn’t one for Quora.
But Apify gives you a lot of margin to customize the basic software to use as you please for Quora.
It also offers you another option for web scraping in which you may contact the Apify support team and ask for a custom solution.
This is not a costly feature as Apify employs authorized freelancers for working on smaller projects.
Another way to get this done is also to put in your vote for a Quora web scraper on the ideas page on Apify website.
If there is a significant number of people who support your cause then Apify will build a Quora scraper.
No matter what option you choose, Apify has its own proxy service that is integrated in all of its tools.
This will enable you to avoid any anti-scraping mechanisms that Quora or any website must have set up.
The pricing for Apify begins at a monthly payment of $49. It supports cloud and desktop platforms.
You can get your data output in many formats such as RSS, XML, CSV, HTML, JSON and Excel.
3. Bright Data
It is one of those web scrapers that can be used to collect data from any webpage after you have generated a request for it.
This puts Bright Data on the top of the list for the best Quora scrapers. It provides structured data in Excel format and supports only web-based platforms.
If you are someone who is not well-versed with coding then this software would be your one-stop solution to web scraping.
Bright Data is priced at $500 for every 151K page loads. It offers free trials for anyone who wishes to try out the software before buying the paid version.
4. ScrapingBee
This is an API that provides rotating proxies and headless browsers for you while you can give your undivided attention to web scraping.
If you get repeatedly blocked by a website when you are trying to scrape, it means that you are missing out on tools that you need to fight the anti-bot mechanisms of many websites.
That is where ScrapingBee comes in.
The pricing for ScrapingBee starts at $49 per month which is for a package named “freelance”. It will give you 100,000 API credits.
However, this package will enable you to enter only one request at a time. This can become time consuming.
In order to facilitate all types of users, ScrapingBee offers multiple packages with different numbers of API credits and concurrent requests.
5. Octoparse
This Quora scraper comes with a free trial that lasts for 14 days. However, there is a limited number of features that you can use during this period.
You need to pay $75 each month in order to be able to use the full version of Octoparse. It supports desktop and cloud formats.
You can get your scraped data in many formats such as SQLServer, MySQL, JSON, CSV and Excel.
This is a premium quality, paid web scraping tool that can be used to scrape data from many websites.
It includes anti-bot detection mechanisms and can prevent you from getting blocked.
You can use this tool to convert Quora web pages into spreadsheets with just a few clicks.
You may also use it to schedule your scraping tasks. This will enable you to complete your Quora scraping without you having to send requests periodically.
Octoparse is a user-friendly tool. You just need to point and click the exact amount of data that you need to scrape and it will get the job done.
There is no limit to the number of pages that you need to scrape. Octoparse will see you through it.
They can also help you to scrape the data if you are too busy to try out the scraper yourself. Their professional data service helps the clients in dealing with web scraping.
6. ParseHub
This is not a dedicated Quora scraper. It is a generic web scraping tool that does not require any coding.
It has a user-friendly interface that is dependent on point and click.
The majority of its features are free but you need to make some payment for selected premium features.
The cloud-based platform can be used by paid users only. You can easily use the free features for scraping Quora.
You will be restricted to using the desktop version only but it is a good deal if it is without any cost.
You can use ParseHub for the most outdated and the most advanced websites. It is a flexible tool that does its job perfectly.
You can obtain the resulting data in Excel and JSON formats. Quora uses indefinite scroll which ParseHub can easily work with.
You can IP rotation with ParseHub which is a useful anti-detection feature if you want to successfully scrape data from a website.
7. ScrapeStorm
The pricing for ScrapeStorm begins at $49.99 each month. The starter plan for this Quora scraper is free but it has limited features.
It can only support desktop platforms. You can obtain the scraped data in formats such as Google Sheets, Excel, CSV, TXT, JSON, MySQL, etc.
This is one of those web scrapers that gives huge support for export systems. ScrapeStorm belongs among the top contenders for Quora Scraping tools.
With just a few clicks you can get all the data that you need in a structured format.
It has an intelligent data identification feature that completely eliminates any need for manual checks.
8. WebHarvy
If you want to avoid the hassle of monthly payments when it comes to web scraping tools then this is the solution for you.
With WebHarvy you just need to make a one-time payment of $139 for a single user. There are no free trials available for this web scraping tool.
You can only use it on the desktop. The scraped data can be retrieved in formats such as TSV, CSV, JSON, TXT, Excel, XML, etc.
It provides intelligent pattern detection in order to further streamline the web scraping process for the user.
It also enables you to scrape categories wise which reduce the overall chances of excessive and useless data collection.
When you purchase the user license for a single user, you get free online technical assistance for one year.
You can also use this tool to automate a lot of tedious and repetitive tasks such as opening popups, filling out forms or clicking links.
All these web scraping tools that have been mentioned above in the article, are readymade and require no additional coding of any sort.
They even have their own proxy systems in place that can beat the anti-bot system of Quora.
This makes most of these tools, a one-stop solution for all your Quora scraping needs.
The multiple formats provided for the output data make them even more user-friendly for those people who do not want to indulge in coding.
What Is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is the process through which you can collect data from websites which can benefit your business or research.
This is an exceptionally useful method for marketers that are trying to collect data for their businesses.
Many huge websites such as Facebook and Twitter have their own APIs that enable users to extract data in larger chunks.
But there are some websites such as eBay, Quora, Newegg, etc that do not allow this practice. In order to extract data from these websites, you need web scrapers.
The data that is retrieved from the website is in a raw form which is then converted by the web scraping tool into a structured format that can be read.
People post tons of useful data online every day. A lot of this data is visible to the public so scraping it is not against any laws.
If you are a marketer, this data can give you a great direction for your research. Web scraping has made a lot of physical and manual research methods redundant.
What Is Quora Scraping And How Is It Useful?
Quora gets approximately 4 million new posts every day. It is a huge amount of data that you can put to use as a researcher or marketer.
Depending on your field of interest, you can gather a lot of useful information from this platform.
People post questions regarding brand recommendations for various products, faults with products and softwares, buying interests, qualities that they are looking for in a particular product, etc.
Quora scraping enables you to gather all this publicly available data in a structured format that can be studied as a tool for further analysis.
This can enable businesses to gain valuable insight from the customers themselves. They can also judge what their potential consumer wants.
All this data can be provided to you in the form of spreadsheets with the help of web scrapers.
This website, like many others, will not allow you to get their data in bulk. You will need to use web scrapers.
These are bots that work in a repetitive and automated manner.
They send multiple requests to the host website in a short span of time. It is impossible to get all this data manually in this much time.
Quora scraping or web scraping in general is not illegal. It is used to gather data that is already available to the public.
Anybody can go and manually copy off the data from any website without requiring any prior permission. However, when it comes to web scraping, we generally talk about a larger chunk of data that is being retrieved at the same time.
This can slow down the host website or make it crash.
In order to avoid these crashes and hold people off from web scraping, websites tend to put in place anti-bot mechanisms such as Captchas and blocking. If a website detects any automated activity such as web scraping, it will start throwing Captchas at you or block your IP address.
In order to escape this issue, you will need to use a web scraper that has built-in support for proxies.
This will enable you to fool the host website as it will think that the data extract requests are coming from different computers.
The anti-bot system that Quora has in place is not effective in the face of a well-reputed Quora scraper.
The web scrapers that have been mentioned in this article are those that put up a fight against these anti-scraping mechanisms so that you can get all your desired data in a structured format.
How to Scrape Quora Data With Python
If you are someone who finds thrill in coding then this is the solution to Quora scraping for you. There are generally 3 methods for scraping data from Quora.
You can use a professional Quora scraper service that can do the web scraping for you, you can use a web scraping tool or you can develop your own Quora scraper through coding.
The first option is usually avoided by many businesses and people because it is quite expensive. The second option has been discussed at length above.
The third option is for you, if you are a coder.
The biggest advantage of developing your own web scraper is that you get to put in the features that you really want in a web scraper and omit those that are of no use to you.
Any Turing programming language can be used for this purpose but Python is the one that is most commonly used for developing web scrapers.
These are web bots that help you in retrieving data from various websites.
If you are new to this, gear up and we will teach you how to use Python to develop your own Quora scraper.
You will need BeautifulSoup for parsing and Requests for the HTTP requests that need to be sent.
The coding that is required to set up a web scraper increases in difficulty according to the number of features that you need your scraper to have.
It also depends on the defense mechanisms that are employed by the website that you are trying to scrape.
In order to use coding for scraping Quora, you will need to send an HTTP request through Requests to the link of the question that you need to scrape.
After a response is returned, BeautifulSoup can be used to parse out the questions and their answers.
Readymade web scrapers come with their own proxies.
When you make your own web scraper with the help of coding then you will need to use the proxy feature of any of the web scrapers mentioned above.
Below is the sample of a code that you may use for scraping data from Quora.
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
headers = {‘User-Agent’:’Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_2) AppleWebKit/601.3.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.0.2 Safari/601.3.9′}
url = “https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-future-of-Donald-Trump”
page_source = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
soup = BeautifulSoup(page_source.content, “html.parser”)
question = soup.find(“div”, {“class”: “puppeteer_test_question_title”}).text
print(question)Scrape Answers by Looping Through
answers = soup.find_all(“div”, attrs={“lass”: “ui_qtext_expanded”})
for answer in answers:
answer = answer.text
print(answer)Stay on top of the latest technology trends — delivered directly to your inbox, free!
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Written by Jason Wise
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