FMiner Basic

FMiner Basic is a web scrapping program specialized in helping you extract data from various websites and save the information on your computer for offline viewing.

The tool shows a welcome screen that gives you the possibility to create a new project or open a previously saved one, check out several tutorials, or access an online help manual. A new project can be generated by providing details about the name and saving directory.

While the welcome panel looks intuitive, not the same thing can be said about the working environment where you can set up your web scrapping projects. It looks a bit confusing at a first glance as you do not know where to get started.

FMiner Basic offers you the freedom to define your projects with the aid of a visual designer. You may create a flow chart in the visual designer and set up each action using diagrams. The tool lets you make use of the drag-and-drop support in order to create complex tasks.

You are given the possibility to perform a series of actions and scrape contents on pages by recording and playing macros. There are several actions that you can choose from, such as go to a specific link, open more links on a page, clear cookies, perform mouse clicks, and enter CAPTCHA input.

A built-in browser window is integrated for helping you visualize the webpages and identify the elements that you want to save.

The tool lets you save the project to a file so you can import it in future sessions, back up data so you can easily restore it in case something doesn’t go according to the plan, as well as export tables to XLS, XLSX, CSV or SQLite.

You can generate statistics about the extracted information (saved, updated and ignored items) and links (completed, remaining and error URLs).

FMiner Basic delivers a handy suite of configuration settings for helping you extract data from websites. The GUI is not quite intuitive so rookies may need extra time in order to digest the entire scrapping process.

On the downside, it doesn’t offer support for several advanced features that can be found only in the Professional edition of the program, such as built-in scheduler, email report, and data adjustments via Java scripts.