Basic Info
RTILA visual web scraper and automationIntro:This software is a full featured web scraper. It resembles me to webharvy, or other popular point and click web scrapers.
It's young software, less than one year old.
Who is this app designed for:Probably everybody can get use of this. On my personal uses, I scrape ecommerces, news, forums, or other pages of interest.
My purpose of scraping an e-commerce is to do a better purchase, I prefer to grab all and filter later to get better information for my shopping.
The GoodI have been using scrapers for long, sometimes I coded myself with python.
I own many tools, like ubot, winautomation, and many others. Long time I don't use them.
RTILA uses a real chrome sandbox and emulates human actions.
Second, the author is quite responsive, and he is very fast and constant in development.
The software has MANY options, and I love the fact of being written using modern technologies.
Not only scrapes text, but it can also download images, videos, files (pdf, docs..) or other type of content.
It uses CSS selectors, not xpath.
Allows filters, regular expressions, and javascript manipulation.
It has all the basic features of a scraper, and some advanced ones, like:
- ftp and mailer (store results)
- scheduler
- proxies
- ability to load chrome extensions
- captcha solving
- webhooks
- Google Sheets integration
There are many actions and events, it uses some pseudocode to execute automation, similar to ubot (visual blocks).
The needs improvement sectionThe user interface should be improved. This is beautiful software with a poor cover.
Other than that, very solid software. Probably I look at it with good eyes because I just love it.
There are very minor bugs from time to time but they are solved quite fast.
Probably version 4 is the most stable and advanced, having 24 minor releases in 3 months, and some features were not trivial to implement.
I'm helping the author with the documentation, and probably that should be improved.
I do that in my free time, just on my blog.
Why I think you should use this productIt has many use cases, I can be getting Minecraft skins for my kids, scraping furniture deals for my wife, or scraping seed plants or trees to plant in winter.
RTILA visual web scraper and automationReally random uses to get information easily.
On my job, usually I do scraping tasks for clients, and they build really creative stuff from that, merging different sources of information to create valuable information.
It can be used to monitor sites too, or create simple (or complex) automations.
Internet sites can be really tricky, this tool cuts down the development time, but it still needs some user knowledge.
How does it compare to similar appsI don't know real alternative to this. My favourite tool was WinAutomation, that has some desktop capabilities too.
RTILA is oriented to browser tasks.
Probably as I mentioned before, a similar tool is webharvy, but RTILA uses a browser extension to work.
ConclusionsProbably this is my best discovery of 2020.
I didn't have many expectations when I saw this software (sorry to the developer, if he reads this).
The screenshots were not sexy at all, and my expectations were not high, but after testing it a couple of hours I found every piece familiar and easy to use.
It's true, I had to ask some questions because I wanted to know all the details. The support was excellent, so patient to answer me all.
Links to other reviews of this applicationThere are very few reviews:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24421092Here it is the Facebook group, with 450 members:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/rtila/I consider myself privileged to be in touch with the author of this software, and he implemented some of my suggestions.
This is my first review, sorry for my typos.
