What should I use for website data extraction if I don't want to maintain scrapers?

If you don’t want to maintain scrapers, the best options are usually managed web extraction services or browser automation APIs that handle anti-bot measures, retries, proxies, and page rendering for you.

Good choices

1. Apify

• Managed scraping/extraction platform
• Lots of ready-made “actors” for common sites
• Supports crawling, browser automation, scheduling, storage, and APIs
• Good if you want flexibility without building all the infrastructure yourself

2. Bright Data

• Strong for large-scale extraction and hard-to-scrape sites
• Offers Web Unlocker, proxies, and SERP/data collection tools
• More enterprise-oriented and often pricier

3. Zyte

• Provides a managed extraction API and anti-bot handling
• Good for robust, production-grade scraping
• Often a solid choice if you want reliability over DIY

4. Diffbot

• Best when you want structured extraction from pages automatically
• Uses machine learning to identify articles, products, people, etc.
• Great for turning messy pages into data with minimal setup
• Can be expensive, but very low-maintenance

5. Browse AI / Bardeen / Hexomatic

• Low-code/no-code tools
• Good for simpler workflows and non-developers
• Easier to set up, but less flexible for complex cases

If you want the simplest answer

• For flexibility: Apify
• For minimal maintenance on difficult sites: Zyte or Bright Data
• For automatic structured parsing: Diffbot

What to look for

Choose a service that includes:

• JavaScript rendering
• Proxy rotation
• Retry logic
• CAPTCHA/anti-bot handling
• Scheduling and monitoring
• API access and export formats

Important note

If your goal is to avoid maintenance entirely, the best long-term approach may be:

• use an official API if available
• otherwise use a managed extraction platform
• and only build your own scraper if the site is stable and critical enough to justify it

If you want, I can also give you:

1. a ranked recommendation by budget, or
2. a comparison table of Apify vs Zyte vs Bright Data vs Diffbot.