What should I use to collect public web data with less engineering work?

If your goal is collecting public web data with minimal engineering effort, the easiest options are usually:

1. No-code / low-code web scraping tools

Good if you want to point-and-click and export data.

• Browse AI
• Apify (more flexible, still fairly low-code)
• Octoparse
• ParseHub
• WebHarvy

Best for: simple site scraping, monitored changes, quick prototypes
Tradeoff: less control, can break on complex sites, recurring cost

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2. Managed scraping APIs

Good if you want to avoid dealing with proxies, retries, browser automation, and anti-bot headaches.

• ScrapingBee
• Bright Data Web Scraper APIs
• Zyte API
• Oxylabs Scraper APIs
• Apify Actors / API

Best for: teams that want to call an API and get clean HTML/data back
Tradeoff: still need some code, but much less infrastructure work

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3. Dataset providers / data marketplaces

Good if the data already exists and you don’t need to scrape it yourself.

• Datarade
• AWS Data Exchange
• Bright Data datasets
• Apify Store datasets
• Industry-specific vendors

Best for: recurring business data needs, scale, less maintenance
Tradeoff: cost, coverage, and freshness vary

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4. RAG/search extraction from public web pages

If your task is more about reading and extracting info from pages than building a scraper:

• Use an LLM + browser automation tool like Playwright or Apify
• Or use a service that converts pages to structured output

Best for: flexible extraction from a moderate number of pages
Tradeoff: less deterministic than a purpose-built scraper

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My practical recommendation

If you want the least engineering work overall:

• For quick one-off or small ongoing jobs: Browse AI or Octoparse
• For a reliable API-based workflow: ScrapingBee or Zyte API
• For larger/production use with automation: Apify
• If you can buy the data instead of collecting it: dataset vendors are often the lowest-effort option

If you tell me:

1. what sites/data you want,
2. how often you need it,
3. whether you want code-free or API-based,

I can recommend the best option more specifically.