Data Miner (Data Scraper - Easy Web Scraping) Alternatives

Data Miner is the Chrome extension whose store listing reads Data Scraper - Easy Web Scraping, and if you searched that phrase you already know the deal: click what you want, get a spreadsheet. Two things push people out: recipes store the position of page elements, so the recipe dies the day the site shifts a column, and the free plan locks your account “indefinitely”, per the pricing FAQ, the month you cross 500 pages. Seven alternatives follow, each fixing a different half of that problem, including a local CLI I ran this morning: 250 rows from a static listing page in 57 seconds, for $0.0049 of gpt-4o-mini.

Data Miner alternatives at a glance

The verdict, up front: if a public recipe already exists for your site and 500 pages a month covers you, stay put, because nothing here is simpler. If either failure mode has bitten you, a brittle recipe or the tab itself, the fix depends on which one. The list below is ordered by how directly each tool answers the two.

This page is part of the web scraping alternatives series; every tool below was priced on its vendor site this week and the local one was actually run.

Tool	What it is	Free tier	Paid from	Beats Data Miner at
Magpie	Local CLI + desktop app	CLI free; Desktop 5 runs	$49/mo	Leaving the tab; selectors that re-synthesize after site redesigns
NoCoding Data Scraper	Chrome/Edge extension	100 credits	$31.90/mo	Exports priced by row count, recipes that stay private
Web Scraper	Chrome/Firefox extension	Free, local, no account	$50/mo cloud	A free sitemap builder with no page cap
Browse AI	Cloud robots	50 credits/mo	$19/mo	Ready-made robots on a schedule, no tab involved
Octoparse	Desktop app, Win/Mac	10 tasks, local-only	$69/mo	Point-and-click that runs headless in the cloud
ParseHub	Desktop app	200 pages/run	$189/mo	Relative selection across linked pages
Apify	Cloud platform	$5 credits/mo	$19/mo prepaid	A marketplace of actors that run on their servers

What Data Scraper - Easy Web Scraping gets right

Search boxes mangle the name. The data scraper, data scraper io, data scraper easy web extension: all of it lands on this one tool, and the confusion is fair, because the product underneath is a decent first scraper. The free tier gives 500 page scrapes a month with no card required. You click the data you want, Data Miner writes a recipe, and there is a public recipe library, so popular sites often need zero work: the extension filters thousands of shared recipes and offers the one matching the site you’re on. Paid plans add a Google Sheets connection, crawl automation over a list of URLs, and a post-scrape JavaScript hook for cleaning values. Privacy posture is clean too: scraped data stays on your machine and recipes contain no data, both stated plainly in their FAQ. For a 40-row table on a static page, once a month, the free plan is honestly enough tool.

Where people leave

The limits are all in Data Miner’s own documentation, which is rare and useful.

The free plan hard-stops at 500 pages a month. Exceed it and, per the pricing FAQ, your account is “automatically locked indefinitely” until you pay. Not throttled. Locked.

Recipes are position-based. Their FAQ defines them as “the name and position of HTML elements on a web page”. Position is exactly what a redesign moves, so the recipe you built in March dies in April and you re-record it. It’s the most common thread in Data Miner alternatives roundups, and the vendor’s own definition explains why.

The billing details have edges. Unused page credits don’t roll over. There’s no partial-month refund on cancel. And the free-plan FAQ notes that when you downgrade, “any private recipes you had may be marked as public”, which means the recipe you built for your company’s internal vendor portal can end up visible to strangers unless you re-check it.

Finally, everything runs in your browser tab, on your computer, during your session. Server-side scraping exists only on custom Enterprise plans. If the job needs to happen at 3 a.m., this is not the tool that does it.

Magpie: replaces the tab, not the clicks

The limits first, plainly: Magpie has no point-and-click builder and no ready-made site templates. There is no recipe library, no “one click on the data”, no Google Sheets connection. If the click-to-record flow is the part of Data Miner you love, stop reading this entry.

What it has instead is a different contract. You describe the fields once as a JSON or YAML schema, or pick one of 27 built-in verticals (article, job posting, event, local business, and so on), and the extraction runs from the terminal with no browser tab involved. Selectors get cached per domain and re-synthesized when a site breaks them, which is the direct answer to position-based recipes dying every redesign. The LLM is yours (bring your own key across seven providers, including a local Ollama model), robots.txt is respected, logins persist as cookie profiles, and a 13-tool MCP server lets an AI agent run the same extractions.

I tested the core claim this morning (October 16, 2026, home connection) on scrapethissite.com’s countries listing, a static page with 250 rows:

magpie scrape "https://www.scrapethissite.com/pages/simple/" \
  --schema countries.json \
  --provider openrouter --model gpt-4o-mini --format json

with this schema written once (and reusable for every page of the listing):

{
  "title": "Country listing rows",
  "type": "object",
  "properties": {
    "countries": {
      "type": "array",
      "description": "One entry per country row in the table",
      "items": {
        "type": "object",
        "properties": {
          "name": {"type": "string"},
          "capital": {"type": "string"},
          "population": {"type": "number"},
          "area_km2": {"type": "number"}
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Result, abridged:

{
  "extracted": {
    "countries": [
      {"area_km2": 468, "capital": "Andorra la Vella",
       "name": "Andorra", "population": 84000},
      {"area_km2": 82880, "capital": "Abu Dhabi",
       "name": "United Arab Emirates", "population": 4975593}
    ]
  },
  "usage": {"prompt_tokens": 7830, "completion_tokens": 6149,
            "usd_estimate": 0.0048639}
}

250 rows, 57 seconds wall time, $0.0049 at gpt-4o-mini prices via OpenRouter. The same run with a zero-LLM vertical or a corpus crawl costs $0 in tokens.

Costs and licensing, so you can compare against the table: the CLI is free and open source (AGPL-3.0-or-later, or a commercial license), and it writes JSON and JSONL; CSV comes from the Desktop app’s export or a three-line converter. The Desktop app gives 5 free runs per install, then $49/month for one computer. If your Data Miner recipes target walled marketplaces (Amazon, LinkedIn, the usual suspects), be clear that Magpie doesn’t get you in there either; nothing honest does. For everything else, the download page has the installers.

NoCoding Data Scraper: the closest lookalike

If what you want is “Data Miner but different pricing”, this is the one. NoCoding Data Scraper - Easy Web Scraping, built by MiniRPA, is the same genre: point-and-click recipes, a public recipe library, pagination handling, exports to Google Sheets or Excel. The economics are where it diverges.

Exports are priced by rows, not pages: 100 free credits on signup, where 1 credit covers an export of up to 50 records and each additional 50 records costs another credit. Credits never expire and recharge at $1 per 10, so a one-off 2,000-row pull is about $4 instead of a $19.99 subscription month. If you graduate to regular use, Plus is $31.90 monthly or $323 a year and removes the export metering entirely. MiniRPA also sells custom recipe builds for $100 to $300 one-off, which tells you what they think your time is worth.

One FAQ answer separates the two. NoCoding’s FAQ, answering whether recipes stay private: “all your own recipes are always private. Even you downgrade to the free plan, all your own recipes will still be marked as private.” Data Miner’s FAQ, on the same question: they “may be marked as public”. If your recipes touch anything internal, that sentence difference is the whole decision.

Web Scraper: the free sitemap builder

Web Scraper, the extension at webscraper.io, is the other tool people mean by “the data scraper”, and it costs nothing to try: build a sitemap by clicking elements, scrape in-tab, export CSV, no account, no page cap on local runs. You trade away the recipe library and the polish, and multi-level sitemaps have a learning curve the size of a small ladder. The cloud plan (scheduling, API) starts around $50/month. We compared it against Data Miner’s exact use case in the Web Scraper alternatives page, including where its own selectors break.

Browse AI: templates that run in the cloud

Browse AI is the closest thing to Data Miner’s ready-made recipe library, except the templates (they call them robots) run on Browse AI’s servers on a schedule. Pick a prebuilt robot for the site, or record your own by clicking, then get email or webhook alerts when the data changes. Free tier is 50 credits a month; paid starts at $19. Two honest catches from our Browse AI page: website caps are small (two sites on free), and recorded selectors need the same maintenance as recorded recipes anywhere. If your actual job is “watch this page and tell me when it changes”, a free monitor beats paying for robots.

Octoparse and ParseHub: desktop builders

If you want a click-to-build workflow that outlives the tab, Octoparse is what most “I’m done with extensions” people actually mean: a Windows/Mac app with auto-detected data lists, a real workflow builder, and headless cloud runs. Free plan is local-only (10 tasks, exports capped at 50,000 rows a month); cloud extraction starts at $69/month. Details in the Octoparse alternatives page.

Where ParseHub wins is relationships: product pages linked from listings, relative selection, JavaScript-rendered content, the flows where flat click-recorders give up. Free covers 200 pages per run, which is enough to prove a site is scrapable; Standard is $189/month. Numbers pulled live from their pricing page this week in the ParseHub page.

Both still cost real money the moment you want scheduling, and neither is cheaper than Data Miner for small jobs. They’re upgrades, not swaps.

Apify: the marketplace that runs on servers

Apify’s store is Data Miner’s recipe library with a data center behind it: prebuilt actors for thousands of sites, running on Apify’s infrastructure, callable by API or schedule. The free plan gives $5 of platform credits monthly; Starter is $19/month prepaid, and the catch is the meter: credits expire monthly and compute is billed by the GB-hour. We ran the full arithmetic, including where the bill actually concentrates, on the Apify alternatives page. Apify is the right answer when a maintained actor already exists for your target site and the job is big enough to justify hosted costs. For a 500-page month it usually isn’t.

More data scraper Chrome extensions, quickly

One search in this cluster reads data scraper chrome extensions scraper tool, three phrases for the same tab-bound idea, and the store has plenty of candidates. Instant Data Scraper is the zero-setup pick: no account, auto-detects list-shaped tables, exports CSV or Excel, free. It’s also one-shot: no saved recipes, no pagination memory, so it’s for today’s table, not a monthly job (its own page is here). Watch for a name collision: a separate, unrelated extension also called DataMiner (store listing “Data Scraper - AI Data Mine”) lives in the store, and searching by name surfaces both. For the fuller field including AI-sheet style tools, see web scraper Chrome extensions; Bardeen and Thunderbit carry that AI-workflow flag in our series.

The page-count math

Data Miner’s tiers price pages per month: $19.99 for 500, $49 for 1,000, $99 for 4,000, $200 for 9,000. The lock rule makes the free tier a trial, not a ceiling you bump against gently.

Now the local math from this morning’s run: $0.0049 for one 250-row page on gpt-4o-mini. Scale that naively to 9,000 pages and you get about $44 of tokens, against $200 for the equivalent Data Miner tier. Two honest footnotes: heavier pages cost more per scrape than the countries page did, and the price of an LLM extraction depends on the model you pick (a local Ollama model is $0). The claim isn’t that CLI extraction is always cheaper. It’s that per-page pricing at $200 for 9,000 pages is expensive next to what the raw tokens actually cost, which is why the expensive tiers of every extension deserve a second look before you subscribe.

FAQ

Is Data Miner free? 500 page scrapes a month, free, no card. Cross the limit and the account locks until you upgrade. Paid plans run $19.99, $49, $99, and $200 monthly by page allowance.

What is Data Scraper - Easy Web Scraping? The Chrome store listing name of Data Miner (data-miner.io). Same product, one name on the store and another on the website, which is why the search results look so noisy.

Do alternatives keep my recipes private? NoCoding Data Scraper’s FAQ promises recipes stay private even after a downgrade. Data Miner’s own FAQ says private recipes “may be marked as public” when you downgrade. Web Scraper stores sitemaps locally.

What’s the best free alternative? Web Scraper for repeatable jobs: free, local, CSV export, no account. Instant Data Scraper for a one-off table with zero setup. Magpie’s CLI for anything you want out of the browser entirely.

Can I scrape without keeping a browser tab open? Not on standard Data Miner plans; server-side runs are Enterprise-only. Browse AI’s free tier runs hourly in its own cloud, Octoparse’s scheduled cloud runs start on paid plans. Magpie runs headless on your own machine, free.

Which one to pick

• Stay on Data Miner if your target site already has a public recipe, you’re under 500 pages a month, and the Google Sheets connection does the last mile.
• NoCoding Data Scraper if you want the same extension shape with row-priced exports, credits that never expire, and a written private-recipes guarantee.
• Web Scraper or Instant Data Scraper if free and in-tab is the whole requirement.
• Browse AI if you want someone else’s servers watching the page on a schedule.
• Octoparse or ParseHub if the job outgrew the tab but you still want to click your way to a workflow.
• Apify if a maintained actor already exists for your target and the volume justifies hosted compute.
• Magpie if the tab itself is the problem: schema-driven or vertical extraction from the terminal, self-healing selectors, your own LLM key, and a Desktop app when you want a GUI. No point-and-click, no template library. That’s the trade.