Capterra is the premier online marketplace connecting businesses with software solutions. With over 1 million validated reviews across 800+ categories, Capterra offers a wealth of valuable insights for companies looking to assess the competitive landscape, generate leads, and understand customer sentiment.
However, manually sifting through reviews is time-consuming and inefficient. Web scraping provides a way to automatically extract this data at scale. And while Capterra doesn‘t offer a public API, tools like Octoparse make it possible for non-technical users to scrape the platform without writing a single line of code.
In this guide, we‘ll walk through how to use Octoparse to extract Capterra reviews and unlock powerful competitive intelligence. Whether you‘re a marketer, product manager, or data analyst, you‘ll learn how to capture key data points, analyze customer feedback, and visualize your findings.
Why Scrape Capterra Reviews?
Capterra hosts a treasure trove of user-generated content on B2B software products. For each listing, you‘ll find:
- Overall rating (1-5 stars)
- Detailed review text covering pros, cons, and use cases
- Reviewer information like company size, industry, and role
- Ratings for specific factors such as ease of use, features, and support
- Pricing details and deployment options
This data offers immense value for businesses looking to:
- Assess the strengths and weaknesses of competing products
- Identify gaps in the market and product improvement opportunities
- Monitor brand sentiment and track customer perception over time
- Benchmark performance against industry leaders
- Generate leads by identifying reviewers likely to switch products
By scraping Capterra reviews at scale, companies can gain a comprehensive view of the competitive landscape and make data-driven decisions. Tools like Octoparse eliminate the need for manual data entry and allow even non-technical teams to quickly extract insights.
What Is Octoparse?
Octoparse is a powerful web scraping tool designed for users of all technical abilities. With its intuitive point-and-click interface, Octoparse enables anyone to extract data from websites without writing code.
Key features of Octoparse include:
- Visual workflow designer: Users can simply click on elements they want to scrape and Octoparse will automatically generate a scraping workflow
- Cloud-based extraction: Octoparse offers cloud services to run scraping jobs 24/7 with no hardware required
- Automatic IP rotation: Built-in IP rotation ensures you can scrape at scale without getting blocked by Capterra
- Scheduled tasks: Set jobs to run regularly, ensuring you always have the latest data
- API access: Developers can programmatically initiate scraping jobs and retrieve data via Octoparse‘s API
- Flexible exports: Download scraped data in CSV, JSON, SQL, or send directly to 3rd-party apps via webhook
Octoparse offers a free forever plan which allows you to scrape 10,000 records per month. Paid plans start at $75/month for more advanced features and higher limits.
Users rave about Octoparse‘s ease of use and customer support. The tool boasts an impressive 4.7/5 stars on Capterra across 470+ reviews. G2 named it a "High Performer" for summer 2022. Reviewers frequently cite the intuitive interface, comprehensive documentation, and responsive support team as reasons to choose Octoparse.
How to Use Octoparse to Scrape Capterra Reviews
Now that we‘ve covered the why and what of Capterra review scraping, let‘s dive into the how. We‘ll break this down into 5 key steps:
- Create a new Octoparse task
- Configure scraping settings
- Select data fields to extract
- Handle pagination
- Export data
Step 1: Create a new Octoparse task
First, open Octoparse and click "New Task" to begin a new scraping job. Choose "Advanced Mode" (don‘t worry – it‘s still no code!) and enter the URL of the Capterra software listing you want to scrape reviews for.
Step 2: Configure scraping settings
Next, click "Settings" to configure scraping behavior:
- Adjust "Wait before action" to introduce a delay between page loads to avoid overwhelming the server
- Set a limit for "Max crawl pages" to restrict the total number of reviews scraped
- Enable "Automatically detect pagination" to capture reviews across pages
Step 3: Select data fields to extract
Now the fun part – choosing what data to scrape! Simply click on the desired elements in the page preview. Common data points to extract from Capterra reviews include:
- Software name
- Reviewer name and details
- Overall rating
- Review title and full text
- Ratings for sub-categories like Ease of Use, Customer Support, etc.
- Review date
As you select elements, Octoparse will generate XPaths to extract them across all matching pages.
Step 4: Handle pagination
To scrape more than the reviews listed on the first page, we need to tell Octoparse how to navigate to subsequent pages.
Click "Add Pagination" in the Workflow pane and select the "Next" button on the Capterra page. Octoparse will automatically detect the pagination pattern.
Be sure to set a limit on the total number of pages to prevent your job from running indefinitely!
Step 5: Export data
Once you‘ve selected all desired data fields and configured pagination, it‘s time to run your job and retrieve the scraped reviews.
Click "Save & Run" to begin the job. You can monitor progress and view logs in real-time.
Upon completion, click "Export Data" to download your scraped reviews in CSV or JSON format. You can also set up automatic exports to save data directly to cloud storage services like Google Sheets, Dropbox, or an Amazon S3 bucket.
Tips and Best Practices for Scraping Capterra
While Octoparse makes it easy to scrape Capterra, there are some important considerations to keep in mind:
- Respect Capterra‘s robots.txt file and terms of service. Avoid scraping at aggressive rates that could strain their servers
- Set a conservative scraping speed with delays between requests. A good rule of thumb is 10-15 seconds between page loads.
- Regularly check for and resolve CAPTCHAs that may interrupt scraping jobs. Octoparse offers an "AutoCaptcha" add-on service to automatically solve these for you.
- Store scraped data securely and ensure you comply with relevant data privacy regulations like the GDPR.
- Consult a legal professional if you‘re unsure about the implications of scraping and using Capterra data for your specific use case.
Analyzing Capterra Reviews Data
Having a structured database of Capterra reviews is only the first step – the real value comes from deriving insights through analysis. Here are some common ways to analyze scraped reviews:
Sentiment analysis: Use natural language processing (NLP) techniques to quantify the emotional tone of reviews. What % of reviews are positive, neutral, or negative? How does sentiment change over time and compare to competitors?
Keyword extraction: Identify the most frequently mentioned words and phrases in reviews. What do customers love most about your product? What are the most common complaints?
Temporal analysis: Slice the data by time to uncover trends and patterns. Are ratings improving or declining over time? How do reviews change before/after a new product launch?
Audience segmentation: Segment reviews by reviewer attributes like company size, industry, and use case. How does satisfaction vary across these segments? Which industries are most/least successful with the product?
There are numerous open-source libraries and commercial tools that can help streamline analysis, from sentiment analysis APIs to no-code business intelligence platforms.
The end goal is to translate raw review text and ratings into actionable insights that inform product development, marketing strategy, and competitive positioning.
Conclusion
Capterra reviews offer a goldmine of insights for B2B software companies looking to stay ahead of the curve. By leveraging web scraping tools like Octoparse, businesses can quickly and reliably extract these reviews at scale – no coding required.
With an automated pipeline for scraping and analyzing Capterra reviews, companies can:
- Continually monitor the competitive landscape and identify opportunities for differentiation
- Understand the needs, pain points, and preferences of their target market
- Track brand sentiment and perception over time
- Generate leads by identifying competitors‘ dissatisfied customers
- Benchmark performance and set data-driven goals for improvement
Of course, review data is just one piece of the competitive intelligence puzzle. Combining scraped Capterra reviews with data from other sources like social media, press mentions, analyst reports, and financial filings can paint an even more comprehensive picture.
The key is to develop a sustainable and scalable process for extracting and analyzing these various data points. With user-friendly tools like Octoparse, even non-technical teams can implement web scraping and unlock the power of alternative data.