Octoparse vs ParseHub: Prices and Limits, Verified

Most octoparse vs parsehub comparisons are affiliate pages running stale numbers: one 2026 list still shows ParseHub Standard at $149 and Octoparse from $75, while both vendors’ own pricing pages, pulled October 16, 2026, say $189 a month and $69 billed annually. This piece starts from those current numbers, then works through the caps that actually decide the choice: what each free plan refuses to do, and what the first paid dollar removes. Nobody pays for features here; you pay to remove a limit.

The verdict

Pick Octoparse when you want the cheapest rung into scheduled cloud runs with anti-blocking, your machine runs Windows or macOS, and your data is row-shaped: thousands of rows from a handful of page types. Pick ParseHub when a Linux build is non-negotiable, your job fits inside page counts rather than row counts, or you want the most literal click-to-select builder of the two. If you can write code, neither is your tool; that road is at the bottom of this page.

	Octoparse	ParseHub
What it is	Visual scraping platform: Windows/macOS desktop app, cloud runs on paid tiers	Visual scraping desktop app for Windows, macOS, and Linux
How you build	Paste a URL, auto-detect builds a workflow, you correct by clicking	Click the data; the engine finds the repeating pattern
Free plan	10 tasks, local extraction, 10,000 rows per export, 50,000 rows/month	200 pages per run, 5 public projects, 14-day data retention
Paid from	$69/mo Standard, billed annually ($83 monthly)	$189/mo Standard
Top tier	$249/mo Professional (annual)	$599/mo Professional
Templates	“Hundreds of preset templates” per Octoparse’s own site; Standard includes 100+ ready-to-use	No per-site template library; you build every project
Scheduling	From Standard	From Standard
API	Data Export API from Standard up	REST API v2 for pulling runs and data
Anti-blocking	IP rotation, residential proxies ($3/GB), CAPTCHA solving ($1–$1.50 per 1,000)	IP rotation from Standard; that’s the list
Where data lives	Free: your machine. Paid: their cloud	Their servers at every tier; free projects are public
Linux	No build, at any price	Native desktop app

Prices above come from octoparse.com/pricing and parsehub.com/pricing, checked October 16, 2026. Both quote in US dollars.

The free plans cap opposite things

Octoparse’s free plan caps data volume. Ten tasks on one device, extraction runs locally, exports stop at 10,000 rows per export and 50,000 rows per month, and your run history keeps exactly the last five runs. Scheduling and API access don’t exist on free. It is, in effect, a local desktop scraper with a meter on the export button.

ParseHub’s free plan caps reach. Two hundred pages per run, and the speed to pull them is published on the pricing page: “Get 200 pages of data in only 40 minutes,” which works out to five pages a minute. Five projects, and the word that matters is public: ParseHub’s own FAQ states that public project designs and run data “may be shared with other users.” Data retention is 14 days, after which results expire.

Which cap bites depends on the job. A wide, shallow job (category pages, directories, 30 products across 200 pages of listing) fits ParseHub’s shape and hits Octoparse’s row caps only if fields multiply. A deep job (10,000 product pages into one spreadsheet) blows through ParseHub’s 200-page ceiling in a single run; you’d need fifty runs at forty minutes each, roughly 33 hours of runtime and a lot of babysitting. Octoparse free swallows that row count in one export, since 10,000 sits under the per-export cap.

One more asymmetry worth naming: privacy. Competitor price research on ParseHub free means your project and its data sit browsable on their servers. Octoparse free keeps extraction on your machine. For anything you wouldn’t publish yourself, that line alone sorts the two.

The paid jump: $69 against $189

Octoparse Standard costs $69 a month billed annually, $83 monthly. The plan description on their pricing page lists 100 tasks, cloud extraction, scheduled runs, Data Export API access, automatic CAPTCHA solving, and unlimited data export, which means the free tier’s row caps are what your $69 removes. Professional runs $249 a month (annual) for more cloud capacity.

ParseHub Standard costs $189 a month with no annual discount advertised. It buys 10,000 pages per run, twenty private projects, scheduling, IP rotation, Dropbox and S3 exports, and a 4x speed increase: their page promises 200 pages in 10 minutes instead of 40. Professional is $599 for unlimited pages per run, 120 private projects, 30-day retention, and under-2-minutes-per-200-pages speed.

There is no mid tier at ParseHub. The step from free to Standard is the largest price jump in this category, and it’s the single most common reason people start hunting for a ParseHub alternative. Octoparse’s ladder has a rung at $69, which is why it wins the budget comparison almost by default. ParseHub’s pricing reads like it was written for team budgets; Octoparse’s for solo operators.

Speed limits, published and not

ParseHub is unusually honest here: every plan states a speed cap, and runs that exceed it queue until capacity frees up. Do the math on your own job. A 10,000-page catalog takes about 33 hours of runtime on free (if you manually chunk it into fifty runs), 8 hours 20 minutes on Standard at twenty pages a minute, and under two hours on Professional. Those are ParseHub’s own numbers, not benchmarks.

Octoparse publishes constraints as counts rather than speeds. Free runs execute locally with two concurrent runs, so throughput is your hardware’s problem; paid tiers move the work to their cloud, where concurrency scales with the plan. If your job is latency-sensitive, ParseHub’s published ceilings are easier to plan around. If it’s volume-sensitive, Octoparse’s caps are the constraint that matters.

Platforms: the Linux line

Octoparse ships Windows and macOS builds only; its own support pages state that Linux isn’t supported, and there’s no Linux tier at any price. ParseHub ships a native desktop app for Windows, macOS, and Linux. If the scrape has to run on an Ubuntu box, a home server, or a VPS without a Windows license, this row decides the comparison before price enters it. Wine and VMs work until they don’t, and you’re troubleshooting an emulation layer instead of scraping.

Anti-blocking: bundled against metered

Octoparse bundles anti-blocking from Standard up: the plan description includes automatic CAPTCHA solving, and the add-on menu prices the inputs separately at $3 per GB of residential proxies and $1–$1.50 per thousand CAPTCHAs. ParseHub’s paid plans list IP rotation, and that is the entire anti-blocking menu.

Set expectations correctly for both. These features handle ordinary friction, not fortified targets. A site that fingerprints browsers and serves challenges per request will break either tool’s runs, and neither vendor pretends otherwise in their documentation. For the mechanics of staying welcome on targets you’re allowed to scrape, the guide on scraping without getting blocked covers pacing, headers, and knowing which battles aren’t yours.

Templates against the relationship engine

Octoparse’s template gallery is real: “hundreds of preset templates” in Octoparse’s own words, with Standard including 100+ ready-to-use task templates for popular targets. (An affiliate page I checked claims “10,000+”; that number appears on no Octoparse page I can find.) For a common target like Amazon or a job board, a template turns the job into paste-and-run.

ParseHub has no per-site template library. Its bet is the relationship engine: you click one element, it infers the repeating structure, and you teach it pagination by clicking through once. That’s more work on site number one, and the same work on site number five hundred. The honest framing: Octoparse is faster on famous websites, ParseHub is predictable on the long tail where no template exists and auto-detect guesses wrong.

The third road

Both tools are desktop GUIs whose best features run on the vendor’s cloud. There is a third position: a local CLI that takes a schema and returns typed data, no visual builder at all. That’s Magpie, the tool I work on, and the limit is stated on the box: if you want point-and-click, keep both of the tools above. If you want the data to never leave your machine, the rundowns of Octoparse alternatives and ParseHub alternatives both cover it, and the cloud-versus-local trade gets its own article.

Octoparse vs ParseHub, decision by situation

Cheapest scheduled cloud scraping: Octoparse, at $69 against $189 for the equivalent tier.

Linux or a headless server: ParseHub, the only one with a native build.

One big catalog, 10,000 pages: ParseHub Standard handles it in one run; Octoparse free handles the row count but you’ll run it locally and manually.

Competitor monitoring you don’t want public: Octoparse free (local) or ParseHub Standard ($189 for private projects). Not ParseHub free.

A famous site you want scraped in ten minutes: Octoparse, if a template exists for it.

Neither, if you code: a script you own beats both pricing pages.

Run your real target through both free tiers for one afternoon before paying anyone. The cap that hurts first is your answer; the pricing pages won’t tell you which one it’ll be, but forty minutes of clicking will.

FAQ

Is Octoparse cheaper than ParseHub? Yes, at every paid rung: Standard is $69/month billed annually against ParseHub’s $189, and Professional is $249 against $599. The free tiers aren’t comparable by price, only by shape: Octoparse caps rows, ParseHub caps pages.

Does Octoparse work on Linux? No. Octoparse ships Windows and macOS desktop builds only, per its own support pages. ParseHub has native Windows, macOS, and Linux apps, so Linux support is one of the few decisions this comparison settles outright.

Which free plan is better, Octoparse or ParseHub? Different shapes. Octoparse free: 10 tasks, local extraction, 50,000 exported rows monthly, no scheduling. ParseHub free: 200 pages per run at five pages a minute, public projects, 14-day retention. Deep spreadsheets favor Octoparse; wide crawls fit ParseHub.

Do Octoparse and ParseHub handle JavaScript-heavy sites? Both render pages in a real browser, so React and Vue sites scrape about as well as static ones. Octoparse additionally sells metered help for hostile pages: residential proxies at $3/GB and CAPTCHA solving from $1 per thousand.

Can I schedule runs on either free plan? No. Scheduling starts at Standard on both ($69/mo Octoparse, $189/mo ParseHub). On free tiers you run tasks manually: local runs on your machine with Octoparse, or manual run starts against ParseHub’s servers.