If data is a fundamental part of your business model, you probably have employees who can collect it. But do they genuinely enjoy this work, or would they rather spend their time analysing data and creating insights? In today’s tight labour market, it makes strategic sense to consider your team’s preferences. This is why more and more companies choose to buy data instead of scraping it themselves.
Introduction
Extracting data from a web page may seem straightforward: someone with HTML knowledge builds or identifies the required elements on a web page and stores them. This can work effectively for one-off projects or a small number of websites. However, as dependence on data grows, the process becomes less straightforward for several reasons: websites change frequently or undergo testing, browsers are updated, security issues arise, and scheduling or data-processing problems may occur. Developers therefore often rely on tools to assist with web scraping.
What are the scraping options?
- 1. Build your own tooling
- 2. Buy scraping tooling
- 3. Outsource scraping / Buy data
1 Build your own tooling
The decision to build scraping tools in-house often comes from the belief that all software development should take place internally. However, this requires specialists with the right knowledge, experience and continuously available time to resolve problems. Even small errors can result in missing or incorrect data. In practice, ensuring data quality and guaranteeing constant data availability prove to be major challenges.
2 Buy scraping tooling
Another issue is that many commercial tools do not include automatic retry mechanisms. Errors therefore need to be detected, rerun and checked manually to guarantee data quality — a time-consuming process. Finally, many scraping tools are still desktop-based, which means your computer must remain switched on continuously and scrapes need to be scheduled or started manually. This makes it difficult to process large volumes efficiently.
3 Outsource scraping / Buy data
Features such as scheduling, error handling with automatic retries and advanced proxy integration are included as standard. Thanks to our expertise, we use the least intrusive methods — also known as ethical scraping — so that websites and servers experience as little load as possible. Through continuous monitoring and updates, we respond directly to the latest techniques used by target websites. This allows us to guarantee both data quality and constant availability.
Conclusion
The choice between scraping data yourself and working with a specialised partner depends on factors such as volume, quality and the expertise available within your team. When data quality, continuity and volume are essential to your business, outsourcing is often the most effective approach. An experienced data partner provides accurate, reliable and immediately usable data, fully tailored to your needs. This means consistent quality, timely delivery and fewer technical and operational concerns surrounding data collection and management.