Octoparse review

Pricing

As of October 2026, the Octoparse pricing page lists three self-serve plans and a custom Enterprise tier:

The $69 figure needs care. The pricing page offers monthly, quarterly and annual billing and says annual billing saves 16% over monthly, but it doesn't make clear which period the "from $69/mo" assumes, and we could not confirm what Standard costs month to month. If $69 is the annual rate, Standard is a commitment of about $828 a year. Read the checkout terms before paying, because the money-back guarantee lasts only 5 days.

Paid plans list IP rotation, residential proxies and automatic CAPTCHA solving as features, and the same page sells residential proxies at $3/GB and CAPTCHA solving at $1–1.50 per 1,000 as add-ons without saying how much of either a plan includes, so budget for the add-on rates on any site that blocks. Other extras: pay-per-result templates at $0.001–3 per 1,000 results, crawler setup by Octoparse from $399 and a full data service from $599. Startups can apply for 30% off for a year.

What a project costs

Because the subscription is flat, cost per page falls as volume rises. A worked example, with assumptions stated: Standard at $69/mo scraping 20,000 pages a month is $3.45 per 1,000 pages before add-ons. If those pages go through residential proxies, bandwidth adds $1.50 per 1,000 pages at 500 KB a page, or $6.00 if the browser loads full pages of about 2 MB (the HTTP Archive's median desktop inner page is 1,963 KB). If one page in ten throws a CAPTCHA, add $0.10–0.15 per 1,000 pages. A protected-site job at that volume therefore lands around $5–10 per 1,000 pages; double the volume and the subscription share halves.

The free plan is the cheap way to learn whether Octoparse can handle your site at all: build the task, run it on your own machine and connection, and pay only when you need cloud runs or scheduling. Compare the same job across tools in the web scraping cost calculator, or read the build vs buy guide if a developer could write it instead.

What you can build

Octoparse is a desktop application with a visual task builder, so typical list-and-detail scrapes are configured by pointing and clicking rather than written. It handles JavaScript-heavy pages, and the 500+ preset templates on paid plans cover common sites without building anything. The plan table also lists parent-child tasks and incremental extraction. Tasks run on your computer or, from Standard up, in Octoparse's cloud on a schedule.

Output options are broad: Excel, CSV, JSON, HTML or XML files; MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle and other SQL databases; Google Sheets; Zapier; and an API (the Data Export API on Standard, the Advanced API on Professional). Professional adds direct saves to Google Drive, Dropbox and S3, cloud task monitoring, automatic cloud backups, priority support and a task review with one-to-one training. Check which plan each export route needs before you build around it.

What it is not: there is no open-source component like Apify's Crawlee or Firecrawl's AGPL core, so your tasks live in Octoparse's app and cloud. Logic beyond the builder's options is easier in code with the open-source frameworks.

Independent evidence and reviews

No independent benchmark measures Octoparse's success rate. Proxyway's Web Scraping API Report 2025 (tests October 2025, published 3 December 2025) covered ten APIs plus Apify, not desktop tools, so there is no published number for how Octoparse does on protected sites. The best public signal is review platforms. On Trustpilot, Octoparse holds 4.2/5 from 97 reviews, but 31% are 1-star, and those cluster around surprise charges and difficulty cancelling. Crash complaints exist too, but mostly date from 2017–18, so they say little about the current app.

Ninety-seven reviews is a small, self-selected sample, not a controlled test, but the billing complaints line up with the unclear price display above. The defence is simple: confirm the billing period at checkout, note the renewal date, and decide within the 5-day refund window.

Where it fits

Our guides pick products by use case (how we pick). In the no-code guide Octoparse is the pick for a point-and-click builder with cloud runs: a visual desktop task builder, cloud runs and scheduling from Standard up, and proxy and CAPTCHA add-ons when a site blocks. ParseHub is the runner-up there, with a usable free plan but paid plans from $189/mo and little visible development since 2023.

Other tools fit other needs better:

• A ready-made scraper already exists for your site: Apify's Store has 19,000+ Actors you configure with a form, with $5 of free usage a month.
• Heavily protected targets: no benchmark measures Octoparse there; a scraping API that bills only successful pages, such as Zyte API (93.14% in Proxyway's 2025 benchmark), is the evidence-backed route. See the scraping API guide.

Pros and cons