Local scraping and cloud scraping - what's the difference

Local scraping scrapes the text currently visible in your browser. Cloud scraping scrapes via browsers in the cloud.

If you simply want to download the data that you see on a single webpage, local scraping is the way to go. If you require more powerful scraping, including an API, multiple pages, infinite scroll, and scheduling, you'll want cloud scraping.

How to Local scrape

After you select the elements you want to extract using the extension (how to do so is covered in the next section), click 'view results' and the data that you selected is there ready to be downloaded. It's fast, simple and free. Local scraping doesn't require you to sign-up and all data remains on your computer.

How to Cloud scrape

Follow the same steps as local scraping and on the results page choose to save your scrape configuration as a recipe. When saving the recipe you can choose how many pages to scrape and whether to schedule the scrape job. Once saved, all you need to do is click 'run recipe' to scrape the web page in the cloud. Your results will appear after a few seconds.