Gulbahar Karatas

Top 5 Social Media Datasets

We compared five leading social media data providers, focusing on the types of social data they offer and the platforms they include. For clarity, these providers fall into two groups: These vendors deliver raw or enriched content (Posts, Comments, Engagement). These vendors focus on public profile information and professional history. Bright Data is a leading…

Best Proxy Manager Tools

Proxy manager refers to two different tool types: Tools were included based on: Pricing and protocol support change frequently; verify the vendor page before purchase. These tools sit in front of services you host and route inbound requests to them. They do not provide proxy IPs. Nginx Proxy Manager (NPM) is an open-source (MIT) web…

Best Instagram Proxies: Residential & Mobile IPs

Instagram restricts and flags accounts that automate access to or scrape Instagram data at scale. Managing multiple Instagram accounts or running Instagram automation safely often requires a reliable proxy provider. We evaluated the top Instagram proxy providers for reliability and geographic coverage: The table below summarizes the top Instagram proxy providers by price per GB,…

Best Indeed Dataset Providers

For getting Indeed data, the market breaks down into three options: do-it-yourself scraping infrastructure, more flexible infrastructure, or managed third-party datasets. Each option comes with different tradeoffs around speed, coverage, reliability, maintenance, and control. Compare Indeed dataset services by pricing structure: Bright Data offers Indeed job listings and company info datasets with detailed fields, including…

Best Facebook Proxies for Account Management

Scraping Facebook at scale is tough due to strong anti-bot protections. We tested the top proxy providers like Bright Data, Zyte, and Decodo. We checked how well they worked with Facebook profile pages, video descriptions, and post content. Here are our picks for the best Facebook proxy servers. * The smallest monthly subscription package for…

Best Python Web Scraping Libraries

Based on my over a decade of software development experience, including my role as CTO at AIMultiple, where I led data collection from ~80,000 web domains, I have selected the top Python web scraping libraries. BeautifulSoup is a Python library for parsing HTML and XML and extracting data from web pages. It sits on top…

Proxy Server Types: Explained & Compared

Proxy servers are grouped by six criteria: traffic flow, IP source, anonymity level, protocol, rotation, and cost. The choice that matters most for web scraping and privacy is the IP source, with residential, datacenter, mobile, and ISP proxies differing in speed and price. The origin of the IP address determines how easily a website can…

Best Chrome Proxy Extensions: Free & Premium

Choosing the best proxy for the Chrome browser is necessary for accessing restricted sites. However, not all extensions work the same way, and two things have changed in the last year: Oxylabs, Webshare, Bright Data, and Decodo include proxies. The rest are managers; you supply the proxy server. Most free claims in this category conflate…

Playwright vs Selenium: When to Use Each

Playwright is a browser automation framework released by Microsoft in 2020. Selenium is an open-source project, active since 2004, that supports a wide range of browsers and languages. Playwright offers fine-grained control for scraping dynamic sources, including single-page applications that load content through AJAX, and supports request interception. Selenium is also used for data collection,…