Used For

• +**Copying competitor prices into Excel every morning** → Automated daily exports to your database, no more manual checking
• +**Your scrapers fail on JavaScript-heavy sites like React apps** → Handles dynamic content and infinite scroll automatically
• +**Feeding messy HTML to your AI tools and getting garbage back** → Exports clean CSV/JSON that actually works with your analysis tools
• +Cloud rotation with thousands of IPs - avoids the blocks that kill homemade scrapers
• +Pre-built templates for Amazon, eBay, social sites - skip the painful setup phase

Best For

• >Tracking 50 competitors manually is killing your weekends
• >Your Python scrapers break every time Amazon updates their layout
• >You need daily price data but your developer quoted 3 weeks

Not For

• -Teams with 5+ developers who can build custom scrapers — you'll hit Octoparse's limits and want more control
• -High-volume operations scraping millions of pages daily — the row limits and costs add up fast
• -Anyone expecting truly complex site automation — logins and multi-step workflows still need manual tweaking

Pairs With

• *Excel (where your scraped data actually ends up, whether you admit it or not)
• *MySQL (to store daily price updates so you're not re-scraping everything)
• *ChatGPT (to clean and analyze the messy data after export)
• *Zapier (to trigger actions when scraped prices hit certain thresholds)
• *Google Sheets (for quick sharing scraped data with non-technical teammates)
• *Tableau (to turn your competitor data into charts executives actually look at)

The Catch

• !The 10k row/month free limit disappears fast — scraping 500 products with 20 fields each puts you over
• !Cloud credits burn through quickly on large sites, Standard plan users report hitting 1M row limits in 2-3 days
• !Sites with heavy anti-bot measures still break through despite IP rotation — Amazon throws CAPTCHAs after 100 pages

Bottom Line

Turns websites into spreadsheets without writing code, but you'll hit row limits faster than you think.