Website Rippers – Cyotek WebCopy vs HTTrack

With an overwhelming flow of information, the cases when you come across useful data websites that you want to store are not rare. So, the question often arises of how to extract content from the entire website and look it through or analyze it later. If you work with visual content, you may want to pull up images from some websites with beautiful photos for your project. In both cases, a website ripper may become a perfect tool to cope with your tasks.

It’s a software solution that you can download, install on your PC, and then use as an offline browser for the sites you have been interested in. Some rippers even operate in a certain computer language and then can only run if the language is enabled on the machine.

So, you can browse and work with the site even without an internet connection whenever you need it. The ripper allows downloading all the site details stored on the server, texts, images, style sheets, and much more. The site is downloaded to a local directory with all its directories built recursively, all the files and images extracted to your computer. All you need with such a tool is high-speed Internet, no programming skills are required or any other special knowledge since the data from a website is extracted automatically, more than that the unstructured information is transformed into usable structured data.

If you have a website of your own, a website ripper will help you regularly make and keep its backups, so a server breakdown or a hacker attack, for instance, bears no threat to you.

If you have some trouble with hosting or accessing your site’s source files, a website ripper will help you download all the necessary details and restore your site on a new server.

If you are a beginner in graphic design or development, a ripper is a useful tool for you to learn, you can download a site you are interested in and study its source code and best coding practices as well as check some new UX patterns.

When you gather information for whatever purposes, such software solutions come in handy as they facilitate simple data extraction. Running scraping algorithms locally, makes the process more efficient.

When there is a demand, there is also a proposition, the market of website rippers is rather rich, but there are solutions that stand out. So, we’ve decided to share some of the best ones – Cyotek WebCopy vs HTTrack.

It’s a free and simple, yet powerful tool for Internet sites download. A user can start from a Wizard and through the settings decide upon the the necessary number of connections needed, the items to extract and interrupted downloads to resume. HTTrack arranges the downloaded website’s link structure like it is in the original. The tool itself is fully configurable with an integrated help system, but still, there are some downsides. One of them is that it’s impossible to download a single site page, only the entire root of the site. Additionally, it takes time and some effort to exclude unnecessary file types.

This tool is advantageous for its possibility to copy websites in full or partially for offline reading. The solution examines site structure and linked resources, as well as images, videos, style sheets, and much more, remapping them to match the local paths. The tool’s extensive configuration allows the user to define which parts or pages of the targeted site should be copied and how. The Cyotek WebCopy's drawback is that it can’t handle sites that use JavaScript or some other dynamic functions. The tool can only scrape what is shown in the browser.

One more open-source tool that is easy-to-use, yet helpful to rip a site is Getleft. It has an intuitive interface and multiple options that allow you to download either an entire website or single pages quite hassle-free. Getleft can resume downloads in case of poor or lost connection and follow links to external sites, if it’s necessary. The drawback of the tool is that it processes HTML only, so it won’t download the files embedded with JavaScript.

Both of them are desktop tools. That’s why you should download the tools from official provider websites and install them on your PC, for starters. After that, the process is quite easy. You need to copypaste the address of the website you want to copy into the special field and choose the save folder where you want to store the data locally. Press F5, and the download will start.

Both desktop tools are free and have a similar function – to copy websites and save their local versions on your PC. From our experience, HTTrack fits more experienced users because it has multiple settings, allows adding various proxies, and sets custom scan rules, limits, and flow controls. CyotecWebCopy is more basic. Other tools with similar functions are Website Downloader, Web ScrapBook, Wget, and Offline Explorer.

To copy a single page, you should open it in a browser, right-click on the options button and choose the ‘save page’/’save as’ option. Use Cyotek WebCopy and HTTrack if you need to download whole websites with multiple pages.

Website rippers are helpful and handy solutions to use for learning, backups, or site migrations. They also come in handy when you want to study particular information later, but with website scraping, it’s better to use specific tools developed and configured for the purpose. DataOx also offers data delivery services, meaning we are ready to do all the job professionally for you, providing you with comprehensive, cleansed, and reliable data scraped. Consult with our expert to discuss your needs and requirements and find the best option for you, it’s free.