Scrapejig

Web Scraper.io behaviour checked against their own documentation on 2026-09-09

Scrapejig vs Web Scraper.io: what happens to your data

Two visual scrapers that both live in a browser side panel, and one real difference between them: what you are holding when you close the tab. This page is written so you can check it — every factual statement about Web Scraper.io below is sourced to a page on webscraper.io, and those sources are listed at the bottom.

The short version. Web Scraper.io's browser extension runs the scrape itself, for free, with no other software on your machine. Scrapejig does not run scrapes at all — it writes you a Playwright script in Python and you run that.

So the choice is mostly not about privacy, where the two are closer than the marketing on either side suggests. It is about whether you want a tool that does the job, or a file that does the job.

What each one runs, and where.

Web Scraper.io is two products under one name. The browser extension is free, and their documentation is explicit about the split: The browser extension creates and runs sitemaps locally. Web Scraper Cloud runs compatible sitemaps remotely and adds scheduling, proxy configuration, monitoring, retries, API access, webhooks, parsing and automated data delivery. Local scraping happens in the browser tab in front of you. Cloud scraping happens on their infrastructure, on a paid plan.

Scrapejig has no second half. The side panel infers selectors, renders the preview and generates the code, all inside the extension. Then it stops. The walking — pagination, scrolling, clicking load-more, visiting detail pages — is done by the Python file it hands you, on your machine, by an installation of Playwright you own. Scrapejig is never running when the scrape is running.

That is the honest cost of our design as much as the benefit. There is no Scrapejig equivalent of pressing Scrape and watching rows appear. You install Python, you install Playwright, you run a file.

 Web Scraper.ioScrapejig
Who performs the scrape The extension, in your browser — or Web Scraper Cloud, on their servers, on a paid plan A Python file on your machine. The extension never runs a scrape
What you save A sitemap — a JSON configuration, importable back into the extension or into Cloud A standalone scrape.py that imports Playwright and nothing of ours
Data out of the extension CSV and XLSX from the extension; CSV, XLSX and newline-delimited JSON from Cloud CSV to the clipboard from the panel; CSV and JSON written by the script when you run it
Other software needed None Python 3 and Playwright, installed by you
Scheduling, proxies, retries Yes, on Web Scraper Cloud No. Not in any tier — cron and your own machine, or something else entirely
Price Extension free. Cloud from $50/mo billed annually, up to custom Enterprise Free to pick and preview. £29 once for the Python export

What leaves the browser.

This is the section the page is named after, so it is worth being precise rather than dramatic — including where precision is not flattering to us.

Web Scraper.io

Their extension privacy policy states plainly that Scraped website data is not being collected and that User created sitemaps are not collected. That is a clear commitment about the two things a scraping user cares most about, and this page will not imply otherwise.

What the same policy says the extension does send is anonymous usage statistics: the browser version and operating system, a record of when an install, update or uninstall happens, and aggregated usage counts — including, in their words, the amount of data scraped excluding data itself, amount of scraping jobs, amount of created Sitemaps. Each installation is given a unique ID number, which they state cannot be used to identify the user directly or indirectly. The policy also says this anonymous statistics collection can be managed via browser extensions options page, so it is a setting rather than a condition of use.

One feature is a documented exception to the rest: the AI Sitemap Wizard. For that feature, their policy says the HTML of the active tab will be sent to Web Scraper to analyze the HTML with AI to generate data extraction selectors, that the URL of the active tab is stored in a database to improve the model, and that The HTML is discarded immediately. Nothing on this page suggests that happens when you are not using that feature; it is described here because a page about what leaves the browser that omitted it would be dishonest.

Sending sitemaps to Web Scraper Cloud is opt-in and manual — their documentation describes signing in to Cloud and choosing to connect it with the extension before anything syncs.

Scrapejig

Selector inference, the live preview and the code generation all run inside the extension. There is no telemetry of any kind: no usage analytics, no crash reporting, no event pings, in the free or the paid build. The extension holds no tabs permission and no broad host permission — the only host in the manifest is api.scrapejig.com, and the only requests that exist in the codebase are about licensing: validating a key you typed, re-checking an activated key at most every 30 days, and requesting a free key with an email address you typed. Those carry a licence key and a random per-install identifier, or that email address. Never page content.

The privacy page names all of it, including the parts that are read locally rather than sent.

So: on the specific question of scraped data, both products keep it on your machine, and we are not going to pretend that is a point of difference. Where the difference is real is the smaller stuff — an install ID and usage counts on one side, nothing at all on the other — and, much more importantly, in what happens next.

The sitemap and the Python file are not the same kind of object.

Web Scraper.io's unit of work is a sitemap: a JSON configuration describing how to navigate a site and what to extract. It is portable in a real sense — it exports as JSON, imports into another installation of their extension, and syncs to Web Scraper Cloud. That is genuine portability, and a JSON sitemap is far easier to read and hand to a colleague than most tools' equivalent.

But it is portable between places that can run it, and those places are their extension and their cloud. JSON is not a program. Nothing outside their runtime knows what a sitemap means, so a sitemap is only as durable as the software that interprets it.

Scrapejig's unit of work is a Python file. Your picks arrive as constants at the top — START_URL, ITEM_SELECTOR, FIELDS, NEXT_SELECTOR, MAX_PAGES — and the rest is ordinary Playwright with the reasoning written into the comments. When a site changes its markup you edit a string, not a recipe. When you want it in a repository, it is a file in a repository. When you want it on a schedule, it is a line in cron. When you want it to do something neither product offers, it is Python and you write the Python.

The claim we actually make is narrow: if Scrapejig disappeared tomorrow, your script would still run. It depends on Playwright and the standard library, not on us. There is no equivalent claim available to any configuration format, ours included — and it is the reason Scrapejig exports code rather than a recipe. The annotated walk-through of the exported file shows exactly what you get.

When Web Scraper.io is the right answer.

Often, and the honest list is longer than a comparison page usually admits:

  • You do not want to install Python. This is the big one. Their extension scrapes on its own; ours requires a working python3, a pip3 install playwright and a browser download. If that sentence sounds like an afternoon, their free extension will have your CSV before you have finished reading this page.
  • You want the result now, in the browser. Press scrape, watch it go, export CSV. Scrapejig's answer to "run it" is "open a terminal".
  • You want scheduling, proxies, retries or an API. Web Scraper Cloud is built for that and Scrapejig has none of it, at any price. We do not schedule, we do not run anything in a cloud, and there is no API.
  • You need a scraping model richer than "an item selector and some fields". Web Scraper.io has a mature selector system built up over years. Scrapejig picks fields on a repeating item, follows one link column to a detail page, and handles four flow modes. That is deliberately small, and small is sometimes just less.
  • It costs nothing to try. Their extension is free, and free with no key is a better first step than any comparison table.

If two or more of those describe you, install theirs. We would rather say that here than have you discover it after paying us £29.

When Scrapejig is the right answer.

  • You already have Python. The setup cost that sinks the case above is roughly zero for you, and the output is a file in a language you already read.
  • You want the scraper, not the scrape. The deliverable is a script you can commit, diff, review, edit and run on a machine that has never heard of us.
  • You want to start from generated code and then go further. Rate limiting, a different output format, a field the picker cannot express — all of it is a text edit away, because it is just Playwright.
  • You want no telemetry at all. Not opt-out telemetry. None.
  • You would rather pay once. £29 for the Python export, no renewal, no per-URL credits. Picking and previewing stay free either way.

Sources.

Every statement above about Web Scraper.io comes from one of these pages, read on 2026-09-09. Products change; if you are reading this much later, check them rather than us. Prices are quoted as their pricing page displays them and may vary by billing period and region.

Web Scraper and Web Scraper Cloud are their owner's trade marks. Scrapejig is not affiliated with them, and this page is not endorsed by them. If you believe something here misstates their product, write to support@scrapejig.com and we will correct it.