Octoparse Alternatives for Windows, Mac & Linux

Octoparse is a good scraper with a platform hole: there is no Linux build. Windows and macOS only, per Octoparse’s own support pages, so anyone scraping from an Ubuntu box needs an octoparse alternative that actually installs there. I checked seven against the same list: which OSes they run on, how you build a task, what the free tier caps, and what paid costs when you outgrow it, and I ran two of them this morning, with numbers below.

Tool	Windows	macOS	Linux	How you build a task	Free tier	Paid from
ParseHub	Yes	Yes	Yes	Visual element picker	200 pages/run, 5 public projects	$189/mo (Standard)
ScrapeStorm	Yes	Yes	Yes	AI auto-detect picker	10 tasks, 100 rows/day export	$49.99/mo (Professional)
WebScraper.io	Any OS via Chrome/Firefox	Same	Same	Click-through sitemap builder	Extension free, unlimited local	Cloud $50/mo
Scrapy	Yes	Yes	Yes	Python code	Fully free (BSD)	$0
Browse AI	Browser (no install)	Browser	Browser	Recorded clicks in a web app	50 credits/mo	$19/mo billed annually
Apify	Browser (no install)	Browser	Browser	Ready-made Actors or code	$5 platform credits/mo	$19/mo (Starter)
Magpie	Yes	Yes	Yes	CLI flags or a desktop form	CLI free; desktop 5 runs	$49/mo (Desktop)

Ranking logic: cross-platform coverage first, then how close each tool gets to Octoparse’s point-and-click feel, then price. Magpie is last on that list for a reason I’ll state plainly, not bury.

What Octoparse gets right, and where people leave

Give Octoparse its due before the exits. Its auto-detect builds a scraping workflow after you paste a URL and click; the paid tiers ship 500+ preset scraping templates for common sites; cloud extraction runs your tasks on their servers on a schedule, with IP rotation, residential proxies, and CAPTCHA solving bundled from Standard up. Build without code, run without your machine: that combination is why it has a large user base.

The leaks are predictable. The free plan caps exports at 10,000 rows per export and 50,000 rows per month, allows 10 tasks on 1 device, and locks template results to view-only unless you pay or go through their MCP export route (2,000 records per week). The first paid tier that removes the export caps is Standard at $83/month monthly billing ($69/month billed annually). And there is no Linux build at any price. If those three lines describe your situation, the tools below are the way out.

1. ParseHub: the closest point-and-click feel on all three OSes

ParseHub is a desktop app for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and its builder works like Octoparse’s: click the data you want on a rendered page, handle pagination with selection steps. For people leaving Octoparse because of the platform rather than the paradigm, this is the least-disruptive switch.

The free plan is real but shallow: 200 pages per run, 5 public projects (public means others can browse your project and data), and 14 days of data retention. Standard costs $189/month for 10,000 pages per run, 20 private projects, IP rotation, and scheduling; Professional is $599/month with unlimited pages per run. That $0-to-$189 jump is the biggest step in this list and reviewers flag it too: there is no mid tier.

• Pros: native Linux build; element-picker workflow nearly identical to Octoparse; handles JavaScript-rendered sites; free tier works for small one-off jobs.
• Cons: $189/month is steep for the step up from free; public projects on the free tier are a privacy question; retention drops data after 14 days.

For a head-to-head with Octoparse specifically, see Octoparse vs ParseHub, and the standalone rundown at ParseHub alternatives.

2. ScrapeStorm: auto-detect that actually ships for Linux

ScrapeStorm’s pitch is Octoparse’s pitch: paste a URL, let AI detect the data, tweak by clicking. Unlike Octoparse, the desktop app runs on Windows 7/8/10, macOS 10.9+, and Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora builds are on their download page).

The free plan allows 10 tasks with unlimited pages per task but caps exports at 100 rows per day, enough to evaluate and not enough to work with. The Professional plan, listed at $49.99/month ($39.99/month billed annually per third-party pricing trackers), raises that to 10,000 rows per day, adds IP rotation, and turns on scheduling at the higher tiers. Setup feels a generation older than Octoparse’s, and the UI is denser than the screenshots suggest.

• Pros: one of the few auto-detect builders with a Linux build; cheap entry relative to Octoparse Standard; local extraction, so data stays on your machine.
• Cons: 100 rows/day on free runs out fast; interface is utilitarian; documentation assumes more patience than Octoparse’s.

3. WebScraper.io: free, unlimited local scraping, builder required

The WebScraper extension (Chrome and Firefox) is the free option I keep coming back to. You build a sitemap by clicking through the page structure in DevTools-style panels, then scrape from the browser. It costs nothing and has no row caps, because the scraping happens in your browser, locally.

Two costs hide in “free.” First, there’s no auto-detect: you define every field yourself, which on a 40-field page is an afternoon. Second, anything beyond your browser’s patience (scheduled runs, proxies, bigger volumes) means Web Scraper Cloud: $50/month for 5,000 URL credits, $100/month for 20,000, billed annually. A URL credit is spent per page loaded, regardless of rows extracted, so pricing scales with pages, not data.

• Pros: genuinely free for local work on any OS that runs Chrome or Firefox; fine-grained control once you learn the sitemap model; exports CSV/XLSX even on the free tier.
• Cons: no auto-detect, no AI assist; pagination-heavy sites take manual sitemap work; cloud pricing is page-based and adds up.

4. Scrapy: the code route that never caps you

Scrapy is a Python framework, free under BSD, running anywhere Python runs. It is the top free alternative on AlternativeTo for a reason: no export caps, no task limits, no credits, and a crawler that outclasses anything here for site-wide jobs. One project I maintained pulled 200,000 pages a week from a marketplace on a single $5 VPS.

The price is engineering. You write spiders in Python, you maintain CSS/XPath selectors, and when the site redesigns, you fix them. There is no element picker and no auto-detect. For a one-off list of products, Scrapy is overkill. For a recurring pipeline you own, it’s the ceiling.

• Pros: free forever; fastest option at scale; pipelines, retries, and middlewares built in; huge ecosystem.
• Cons: Python required; selectors break on redesigns and you are the maintenance plan; JavaScript-heavy sites need Scrapy-Playwright bolted on; the setup guide for that lives at scraping dynamic websites.

5. Browse AI: no install at all, priced per credit

Browse AI runs entirely in the browser, so the OS question dissolves: it works anywhere you have Chrome. You train a “robot” by recording clicks on the target page, then schedule monitoring or bulk runs on their cloud. For non-technical teams watching competitor pages, this is closer to Octoparse’s promise than anything else here, with zero setup.

The free plan gives 50 credits per month (roughly 50 pages or 500 rows). Paid starts at $19/month billed annually ($228 upfront) for 12K–24K credits a year, with Professional from $69/month. Credit math matters: a row of extracted data costs credits too, so a 10,000-row extract is a paid-plan job, and protected sites like Amazon consume more.

• Pros: nothing to install; recorded-clicks builder is genuinely easy; monitoring with change alerts is the core strength.
• Cons: everything routes through their cloud, so no local mode; credit pricing gets expensive past small volumes; annual billing is pushed hard.

6. Apify: where Octoparse’s template library actually went

If the 500+ preset templates are the part of Octoparse you’d miss, Apify’s Store is the closest replacement. Thousands of ready-made Actors (prebuilt scrapers) run on Apify’s cloud; the flagship TikTok and Instagram scrapers alone show 337K and 432K lifetime runs on their store pages today. You pick an Actor, paste a URL, schedule it, and consume results through the API. No building, no scraping infrastructure on your side.

Pricing is credit-based: the Free plan gives $5 of platform credits a month, Starter is $19/month (with $19 of credits included), and compute units cost $0.20 each at that tier. Costs track how long your Actor runs and how much it downloads, so a monthly Instagram crawl can be dollars while a daily one adds up. Note the trade Apify makes that local tools refuse: those social-media Actors work because Apify maintains unblocking infrastructure. Magpie, for comparison, cannot extract Instagram, TikTok, or X at all.

• Pros: the largest library of prebuilt scrapers for specific sites; scheduling, API, and proxies all included; runs in their cloud on any OS with a browser.
• Cons: cloud-only, priced per compute unit, so heavy schedules cost real money; Actor quality varies by publisher; your data passes through their servers.

The full rundown of the platform lives at Apify alternatives.

7. Magpie: the local CLI with typed extraction, no visual builder

This is the tool I work on, so weigh that. Magpie takes a different position from everything above: a local binary (Windows, macOS, Linux) that fetches a page, strips boilerplate, and extracts — from the command line or a desktop app. The data never leaves your machine.

Plainly, the limit: Magpie has no point-and-click builder and no ready-made site template library. There is no element picker, no auto-detect workflow, no gallery of preset site scrapers. The desktop app is a form with a URL field and a Run button, not a visual designer. If what you want from Octoparse is the builder, ParseHub or ScrapeStorm are the honest picks. If what you want is the extracted data, typed and cheap and repeatable, here is what that looks like today, on a live site built for scraping practice.

Template-like extraction without building anything. Magpie ships 27 typed verticals that fire on known page patterns. An HN story becomes a typed record with one command:

$ magpie scrape "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50107379" \
    --vertical hackernews --format json

{
  "title": "Muse Spark Open",
  "record": {
    "kind": "story",
    "points": 727,
    "comments": 66,
    "author": "bigwheels",
    "url": "https://research.meta.ai/blog/muse-spark-open"
  }
}

That ran in 5.0 seconds, no key, no configuration. (Output abridged: the URL bookkeeping fields and the raw HTML text field are dropped.) Twenty-seven verticals is not Octoparse’s template library — it covers common structured page types (products, articles, jobs, events, repos), not specific sites.

Where a template doesn’t exist, AI extraction fills in. Describe the fields as a JSON Schema, bring your own LLM key, and Magpie extracts to that shape:

$ magpie scrape "https://books.toscrape.com/catalogue/a-light-in-the-attic_1000/index.html" \
    --schema book.schema.json --provider openrouter --model anthropic/claude-haiku-4.5

(Output abridged: the extracted block is what the schema produced, with usage keeping the provider’s real accounting.)

{
  "url": "https://books.toscrape.com/catalogue/a-light-in-the-attic_1000/index.html",
  "title": "A Light in the Attic | Books to Scrape - Sandbox",
  "extracted": {
    "in_stock": true,
    "price_gbp": 51.77,
    "title": "A Light in the Attic"
  },
  "usage": {
    "provider": "openrouter",
    "model": "anthropic/claude-haiku-4.5",
    "prompt_tokens": 716,
    "completion_tokens": 33,
    "usd_estimate": 0.000881
  }
}

The run reported 716 prompt tokens, 33 completion tokens, $0.0009 per the provider’s usage block, and finished in 4.6 seconds (re-run just now, uncached, same values back). The schema’s rating field was optional, and the model skipped it: required fields come back, optional ones don’t always.

The rest of the pipeline: crawling with depth and page caps, login sessions, JS rendering, watch mode with webhooks, and an MCP server so agents can drive it. Politeness is built in (robots.txt respected, auto-throttling), but note what that means: Magpie detects bot challenges and reports them; it does not defeat them, so heavily protected sites are a poor fit.

• Pros: native on all three OSes; typed output (JSON/JSONL) that pipelines cleanly; AI extraction to your schema for fractions of a cent; local-first, AGPL-3.0-or-later (or a commercial license); the CLI is free with no run counter.
• Cons: no visual builder and no template library, full stop; the desktop app is free to download with 5 free runs per install, then $49/month for a license (one computer at a time); it respects robots.txt and won’t push through anti-bot walls.

Pricing reality check

Plan	Price	What unblocks
Octoparse Standard	$83/mo ($69 annual)	Export caps gone, scheduling, 3 cloud runs, anti-blocking
ParseHub Standard	$189/mo	10,000 pages/run, private projects, scheduling
ScrapeStorm Professional	$49.99/mo ($39.99 annual, listed)	10,000 rows/day, IP rotation
WebScraper Cloud Project	$50/mo (billed annually)	5,000 URL credits, scheduler, API
Browse AI Starter	$19/mo (billed annually)	12K–24K credits/year
Magpie Desktop	$49/mo after 5 free runs	Unlimited runs, one machine; CLI stays free

Read the caps, not just the prices: Octoparse’s $83 buys cloud infrastructure, ScrapeStorm’s $50 mostly buys daily export volume, and ParseHub’s $189 buys pages per run. The cheapest paid tiers here (Apify and Browse AI at $19) are also the ones most likely to run out first, because both meter usage after the included credits.

FAQ

Does Octoparse work on Linux? No. Octoparse ships Windows and macOS builds only; its support pages state Linux and Debian systems aren’t supported. Unofficial routes (Windows VM, Wine) exist but aren’t supported. Native-Linux picks: ParseHub, ScrapeStorm, Scrapy, Magpie.

What’s the best free Octoparse alternative? The WebScraper.io extension: free, unlimited local scraping, runs on any OS with Chrome or Firefox. If you write Python, Scrapy is free with no caps. ScrapeStorm’s free plan (10 tasks, 100 rows/day) is the closest to a point-and-click experience.

Is ParseHub actually free? For small jobs: 200 pages per run, 5 public projects, 14-day retention, no credit card. Past that it’s $189/month for Standard, which is why many people pair the free tier with a second tool rather than upgrading.

Which Octoparse alternative has cloud scheduling? Apify, Browse AI (from $19/month, annual), WebScraper Cloud ($50/month), and ParseHub Standard ($189/month) schedule runs on their servers. The local tools schedule through your OS — cron on Linux/macOS, Task Scheduler on Windows.

Is Magpie a good Octoparse alternative? For extraction, yes: schemas + AI, 27 typed verticals, crawling, local-first. For the point-and-click builder, no. There isn’t one, and that’s stated on the box rather than discovered after purchase.

Picking your Octoparse alternative

If the Linux build is your blocker, install ParseHub and rebuild one existing Octoparse task in it. If the picker clicks for you, you’re done in an afternoon. If row caps are the blocker, the WebScraper extension is free long enough to decide whether sitemaps beat spreadsheets. And if you’d rather type one command than click through a builder, magpie scrape with a schema file does the extraction job for under a cent a page.