# Diffbot Reviews **Vendor:** Diffbot **Category:** [Data Extraction Tools](https://www.g2.com/categories/data-extraction-tools) **Average Rating:** 4.9/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 29 ## About Diffbot Diffbot provides a suite of products built to turn unstructured data from across the web into structured, contextual databases. Diffbot's products are built off of cutting-edge machine vision and natural language processing software that's able to read billions of documents every day. Diffbot Knowledge Graph Diffbot's Knowledge Graph product is the world's largest contextual database comprised of over 10 billion entities including organizations, products, articles, events, and more. Knowledge Graph's innovative NLP and fact parsing technologies link up entities into contextual databases, incorporating over 1 trillion "facts" from across the web in nearly live time. ## Diffbot Reviews ### 1. The most Competant Web Crawling Service I've used **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Justin W. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 03, 2023 **What do you like best about Diffbot?** Overall, Diffbot's tools are simple to use and understand outside of more complex use cases. We use several of their features to deliver content insights to our clients. I would recommend Diffbot to any person or organization that needs to pull large amounts of data from arbitrary web sources. The first tool we use is the crawlbot, which we appreciate is configurable and extremely capable. In most of our use cases - we just need to point to a URL and have it repeat every so often to discover new content. After crawling, the data is available via an easy-to-parse JSON file. We also use the Diffbot Knowledge Graph API. The powerful DQL language allows us to query a massive amount of data to find articles and entities. DQL is simple to use, and the GUI interface allows easy testing and iteration. Diffbot's customer service is also exceptional. Our contact has been very attentive in helping us learn how to properly use Diffbot's services to meet our needs. He has organized one-off Zoom meetings to walk us through the appropriate method for creating DQL queries and has expedited bug fixes required for our use cases. **What do you dislike about Diffbot?** Diffbot is a powerful tool, and with its numerous capabilities, it can be difficult for those unfamiliar with it to understand how to use it properly. Fortunately, Diffbot provides excellent customer service, which can help guide you through the process of determining the best practices for your use case. **What problems is Diffbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** Diffbot offloads the complex and difficult process of web crawling, scraping and analysis/parsing. Rather than writing our own in-house web crawler, we can spend our time elsewhere building features for our clients. Diffbot's Knowledge Graph allows us to find relationships between articles and entities across the web in near real-time. This feature has been invaluable in providing insightful information to our clients. ### 2. Diffbot is a game-changer. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kurt L. | Director, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 07, 2022 **What do you like best about Diffbot?** Diffbot makes the difficult task of managing data and extracting useful information much easier. They provide access to a seemingly infinite amount of company and contact information and are continuously improving their user interface to add even more value. I use Diffbot every chance I can! **What do you dislike about Diffbot?** Diffbot is very responsive and always willing to help. Their interface still needs some improvements, but I have been their client for over a year now and have seen vast improvements. **What problems is Diffbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** Diffbot is a better version of ZoomInfo with more capabilities beyond primary company, industry and contact info. They have additional tools which allow for data enrichment and are progressing towards in-depth market analytics. Indeed a total-package solution. ### 3. Diffbot Increases Efficiency **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 25, 2021 **What do you like best about Diffbot?** Prior to using Diffbot, we relied primarily on RSS feeds and a web scraping tool that is based on the visual layout and HTML of a webpage. We were very dependent on X Paths to get the data we wanted. We find that the Diffbot crawlers are more stable in the long term because they are not as impacted by website design changes. This saves us a lot of time that we would otherwise be spending on maintenance. **What do you dislike about Diffbot?** The two issues that are most challenging for us are: 1. Diffbot does not recognize PDF documents, and we frequently would like to ingest them as articles. 2. We find it difficult to troubleshoot a crawler in situations where it is not bringing in data or it is not bringing in the data we are expecting. **What problems is Diffbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** The biggest problem that Diffbot solved for us is reducing the amount of maintenance we have to do on our scraped websites. We use heavily Diffbot's full text capability and Diffbot’s metadata is also useful for us. The metadata that we use most is Diffbot’s language designation to ensure that our clients are seeing only articles in the languages that they choose. We also see great potential for using the bulk API to become more efficient in our content ingest process and we are excited to continue to explore this option. ### 4. social media and news monitoring **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nitin A. | Maulden-Entergy Chair Professor of Information Science, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 23, 2020 **What do you like best about Diffbot?** Diffbot provides great APIs, technical resource, and overall service. Their technical resources are one of the most advanced and highly accurate. Diffbot's team keeps their APIs up to date with social media's rapid evolution. The customer support is equally helpful and very friendly. They are very willing to work with flexible scenarios, accommodate needs and low budgets for small research groups, provide demo and trial accounts to experiment. Overall, they are the best social media data provider and analysis company, in my experience of over a decade. **What do you dislike about Diffbot?** This is more like a suggestion. Diffbot has several excellent capabilities and they are constantly improving and adding new features. Current customers and perhaps prospective ones too would benefit from a weekly/monthly newsletter, or social media updates, about these new developments. **Recommendations to others considering Diffbot:** I would strongly recommend Diffbot. But if you are still undecided, contact their support staff for demo/trial account. You won't regret it! **What problems is Diffbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** Social media and news monitoring. Diffbot's services have allowed us to streamline our data collection method. Previously, we wrote our own web crawlers/scrapers for blog sites which would break quite frequently. Diffbot has removed that hurdle. We are now looking forward to using the NLP/AI capabilities provided by Diffbot. ### 5. Excellent and reliable service over 4 years **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tom W. | C, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 21, 2021 **What do you like best about Diffbot?** High detection accuracy and uptime: most of the time we can send API requests and know that the responses from Diffbot will be valid. **What do you dislike about Diffbot?** Some old versions of Python are used (<3.0) and could be upgraded. **What problems is Diffbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have been using the Article and Analyse APIs as a core part of our pipeline. After doing a build-vs-buy comparison, we realized that it would be far preferable to leave this step to an external best-in-class solution, rather than to build (and importantly *maintain*) in-house. Wherever the automated page structure analysis fails, our team can easily "teach" it the structure, and in the rare cases where that fails, the Diffbot team are very responsive to address issues. ### 6. Diffbot's Knowledge Graph is truly a web-scale database you can query **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Online Media | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 04, 2020 **What do you like best about Diffbot?** The KG is amazingly comprehensive. Products, people, corporations, and more all linked together in a contextual way. KG provides a user friendly way of feeling like you've scraped the whole web. No custom scraping rules, no need to figure out the nuances of where information is housed online. Just query and see if what you're looking for is on the public web. Finally, export features are great. You can export to CSV or JSON. I believe there are also a host of APIs where you can extract data on different entity types. **What do you dislike about Diffbot?** For advanced queries you do have to learn Diffbot's query language (DQL) **Recommendations to others considering Diffbot:** Try out the free trial. It doesn't take long to get up and running with the KG. In a matter of a few minutes you can begin to see what types of entities are returned from queries. If you want a little more hand holding reach out for a demo and their team will show you some cool queries, use cases for the Knowledge Graph, etc. Also, Diffbot's crawling product is relatively low barrier to entry. Try it out to pull ALL SORTS of data from competing sites. **What problems is Diffbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** We've used Diffbot's KG for a variety of online media operations including: - Live news monitoring of higher education entities - Pulling of trends for data journalism projects - Product price fluctuations for the purposes of placing affiliate links ### 7. Excellent lead gen and wide knowledge search tools **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sarah A. | Head of Brand and Content Marketing, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 14, 2020 **What do you like best about Diffbot?** We've been using both the Knowledge Graph and Enhance products. We use the Knowledge Graph for a wider search, finding individuals with certain job titles at certain orgs. Then we enrich those profiles with Enhance, together it's a great market research and lead enrichment set up. **What do you dislike about Diffbot?** We don't need all of Diffbot's offerings. (At least for now.) Their APIs and crawler aren't super applicable to our use case at the moment. With that said, seeing what type of well-formed data is returned from other Diffbot products makes us think we could find a use for these down the road. We aren't a technical team. So this aspect of Diffbot's products isn't really applicable to us... but from what I understand we should be able to easily find an individual who can help us make better use of Diffbot's more technical products. **What problems is Diffbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** We generate leads from many, many industries and in many nations. Many lead gen tools have trouble with non western europe/US locations. Diffbot has a pretty wide coverage globally (that we've seen). We had not found a web data provider that had the breadth of org and org people data. Nor had we found a web data provider who had global coverage. Diffbot results can be in any language but they're processed to where tags and other metadata are in English. ### 8. Diffbot helped us bring our product to market in under a month. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ryo C. | Co-founder, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 01, 2020 **What do you like best about Diffbot?** Before using Diffbot, we considered building our own scraping system. This would have cost us at least 4 weeks of development time up-front and 1-2 days of maintenance cost on a monthly basis. The time itself is valuable, but even more so when considering the opportunity cost of what that time could be spent doing in an early-stage startup. After integrating Diffbot, we have that time back to building our business, developing exciting features for our customers and growing our customer base. The API has been reliable and the data that Diffbot is retrieving adds value to our customers with every content brief that is created. **What do you dislike about Diffbot?** No downsides so far. We're getting value out of their service and would recommend to anyone looking for a reliable content extraction API. **What problems is Diffbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** The biggest problem that Diffbot solved for us is reducing our time-to-market. Diffbot enabled us to rapidly build our product so that we could test it with an initial set of pilot customers. With Diffbot we were able to focus on solving problems for our customers instead of worrying about building or scaling a web scraper from scratch. As a result, we were able to get initial traction within a month of coming up with the idea and can now easily support the new customers that we are acquiring. ### 9. Diffbot's Knowledge Graph is a powerful tool for sales, analytics, and market research **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kevin T. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 14, 2020 **What do you like best about Diffbot?** The ability to enhance my existing data. I have company information imported from other sources such as Crunchbase. With a simple script in Google Sheets, I was able to enhance the company information with things like employee skills, common employee titles, technology stack used, and recent articles about the company. As a result, I was able to better prioritize my leads and quickly filter out the unqualified ones, saving me time. The ease of finding new leads. I can search new companies based on industry tags, employee size, funding amount, technology stack, and employee skills chained together with complex logic using a powerful query language. The number of high quality leads I found through the Diffbot Knowledge Graph more than tripled the number of high quality leads I found from other imported sources. **What do you dislike about Diffbot?** There's a bit of a learning curve to the Diffbot Query Language if you are not used to forming database queries. But their support team is pretty helpful, and one you work out a few examples and get used to building queries, you will realize just how powerful your searches can become. **Recommendations to others considering Diffbot:** The Knowledge Graph's trillion facts is only half of what makes it so powerful. The Diffbot Query Language is the other half. Don't be intimidated by the query language, and you will be amazed at how well you can pin-point your searches for the exact criteria, and also how comprehensive the data is returned. **What problems is Diffbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** I mainly used Diffbot's Knowledge Graph to help generate and prioritize high quality leads for outbound sales. Diffbot helped me find companies that fit my ideal customer profile, and with its rich information on each company, allowed me to better rank and prioritize them. As a result, I was able to prospect companies I never would have found without Diffbot, and also saved me a lot of time focusing on the high quality leads while filtering out the low quality ones. ### 10. Like an extension of our infrastructure **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ian K. | Director, Media Operations, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 22, 2020 **What do you like best about Diffbot?** Working with just one engineer, we were able to get a simple integration going within a week. We used the Article API to scale up and improve something we had already been doing in-house but didn't have the necessary resources to justify doing on our own. Diffbot allowed us to outsource something that was not a core focus and use those freed up resources to scale up other aspects of our infrastructure. **What do you dislike about Diffbot?** Not much really. Our rep keeps reminding us we're only using a fraction of what we could be using. One of these days we'll have the time to explore some of the higher-level knowledge graph APIs, one of these days. **What problems is Diffbot solving and how is that benefiting you?** Crawling and extracting information from HTML. ## Diffbot Discussions - [What is the best way to enhance understanding of Diffbot Query Language?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/25034-what-is-the-best-way-to-enhance-understanding-of-diffbot-query-language) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [What does Diffbot do?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-does-diffbot-do) - 1 comment ## Diffbot Pricing - **Trial**: $0 14 days free Extraction API and Knowledge Graph Trial - **Startup**: $299 /Month Access to scalable extraction API and Knowledge Graph plan for one user - **Plus**: $899 /month Access to scalable extraction API, Knowledge Graph, and Crawlbot access for up to 3 users - **Enterprise**: Custom Pricing Access to scalable extraction API, Knowledge Graph, and Crawlbot access for up to 5+ users [View full pricing details](https://www.g2.com/products/diffbot/pricing) ## Diffbot Features **Lead Generation** - Lead Builder - CRM Integration - Marketing Automation Integration - Social Media Integration - Data Import & Export Tools **Media Channels** - Broadcast Media - Print Media - Online Media **Lead Intelligence** - Lead Validation - Lead Enrichment - Lead Quality - Lead Analysis - Browser Extension **Data collection** - Natural Language Processing (NLP) - Data Sources - Custom Research Sources - Lead Enrichment - Advanced Data Collection **Data management** - Data repository - Natural Language Processing (NLP) - Data quality - Automation - Data structuring **Geographic Coverage** - Local Media - National Media - International Media **Segment Trending** - Web - Social - Benchmarks - Finance **Functionality** - Customized Datasets - Customer support - Real-time data - Complete datasets - Compliance - Plug-ins **Agentic AI - Lead Intelligence** - Cross-system Integration **Reporting** - Keyword Targeting - Custom Feeds and Alerts - Custom Reports - Dashboards **Analysis** - Custom Dashboards - Reports - Integrations **Agentic AI - Media Monitoring** - Autonomous Task Execution - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Natural Language Interaction - Proactive Assistance **Platform** - Search - User, Role, And Access Management - Mobile User Support - Alerts - Collaboration - Compliance **Generative AI** - AI Text Generation - AI Text Summarization **Agentic AI - Market Intelligence** - Cross-system Integration - Proactive Assistance ## Top Diffbot Alternatives - [Apify](https://www.g2.com/products/apify/reviews) - 4.7/5.0 (438 reviews) - [Clearbit](https://www.g2.com/products/clearbit/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (621 reviews) - [ZoomInfo Sales](https://www.g2.com/products/zoominfo-sales/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (8,823 reviews)