Apifier vs Portia: What are the differences?

What is Apifier? Hosted web crawler for developers. Apifier is a hosted web crawler for developers that enables them to extract data from any website using a few simple lines of JavaScript and rapidly build new apps on top of existing third-party web apps and data sources.

What is Portia? Visual web scraping tool that lets you extract data without writing a single line of code. Portia is an open source tool that lets you get data from websites. It facilitates and automates the process of data extraction. This visual web scraper works straight from your browser, so you don't need to download or install anything.

Apifier and Portia can be categorized as "Web Scraping API" tools.

Some of the features offered by Apifier are:

• Tell the crawler what to do using a few simple lines of Javascript with jQuery, Underscore.js or any other client-side library
• Crawl and extract data from websites that employ AJAX, complex pagination or infinite scroll using the same tools you already use for your front-end development
• No need to install browser plugins, download any tools, setup cron jobs, databases or proxy servers

On the other hand, Portia provides the following key features:

• Extracts data from websites based on visual selections by the user
• Creates generic web scrapers which are capable of extracting data from any web page with a similar structure
• Exports scraped data in CSV, JSON, JSON-lines and XML

Portia is an open source tool with 7.08K GitHub stars and 1.12K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Portia's open source repository on GitHub.