[How-to] Octoparse Free vs Paid: What the Free Plan Actually Lets You Scrape

Octoparse sells itself as a no-code web scraper — a tool that copies data off web pages for you, with no programming. The headline is “free forever,” and that part is true. The catch nobody says out loud: the free plan runs entirely on your own computer, and the first feature most beginners actually reach for lives behind a US$83-a-month wall.

This guide gets you scraping on the free plan today, shows you exactly where it stops, and helps you decide whether the paid jump is worth it for what you’re doing. Prices vary by country; we checked from Taiwan.

Get your first scrape running

You can have real data in a spreadsheet in under an hour. Here’s the short path.

1. Download and install the desktop app. Free extraction is “local,” meaning the scrape runs on your own machine, so you install software rather than work in a browser tab.
2. Create a free account. The free plan is permanent — there’s no trial clock ticking down.
3. Paste the address of the page you want data from into the app’s built-in browser.
4. Let auto-detect work. Octoparse highlights what looks like a list — product names, prices, rows — and offers to grab it. For common sites there are 500+ ready-made templates: pre-built scrapers where you type in a search term or URL and skip the setup entirely.
5. Click any fields auto-detect misses. The app builds the extraction rules visually as you point.
6. Run it. On the free plan the job runs locally, so your computer stays busy and has to stay awake until it finishes.
7. Export to Excel or CSV.

That full job counts as one of your 10 tasks — a task being one saved scraping job you can re-run.

Figure: octoparse.com official pricing page, captured 2026-10-28.

What “free forever” actually covers

The free tier is generous for learning and small jobs, but it has five hard edges:

• 10 tasks
• 1 device
• local extraction only
• single-export cap of 10,000 records (one row of data = one record)
• monthly export cap of 50,000 records

The two export numbers trip people up because they’re separate ceilings. Any one run hands you at most 10,000 records. Across a whole month you can export at most 50,000. So even if you keep each run modest, roughly five decent exports and you’ve spent the month’s allowance.

The 1-device limit means you can’t log in on a work laptop and a home desktop and split the load between them. And “local” is the big one: close the laptop, and the job stops.

The blockers beginners hit — and the fixes

Most free-plan frustration comes from four places.

A site blocks you after a few pages. The paid fix is IP rotation — cycling through different internet addresses so the target site doesn’t see every request coming from one place and shut you out. That’s not on the free tier. On free, slow the scrape down, pull fewer pages per run, or use a template built for that site.

A CAPTCHA wall appears — the “click all the traffic lights” puzzle that proves you’re human. Automatic solving is paid-only. On free, you either clear it by hand or pick a site that doesn’t gate its data.

You hit the 10,000 single-export cap. Split the job into smaller URL ranges and export in batches, keeping an eye on the 50,000 monthly total so you don’t run dry.

Your computer sleeps mid-run. Turn off sleep for long jobs, or accept that anything meant to run overnight really wants the cloud — which is paid. Likewise, if you need results to drop straight into Google Sheets, that automatic sync only exists on the top tier.

Figure: compiled by AMPM from its verified data (last verified 2026-10-27).

🔍 AMPM exclusive check

What we verified that the pricing banner doesn’t make obvious: “free forever” and “local extraction” are the same sentence. On the free plan, your machine is the server. We confirmed on 2026-10-27 that free runs never touch Octoparse’s cloud, so a scrape only moves forward while the app is open and the computer is awake. The pricing page says “local” but never spells out that consequence, and it’s the detail that catches new users out.

We also confirmed the two export caps are independent: 10,000 per single export and 50,000 per month. Beginners read one number and assume the other scales with it. It doesn’t.

Honesty note: Octoparse entered our tracker as a challenger candidate, so this is a first-round check, not our usual three-way manual cross-check. Every number here matched the official pricing page on 2026-10-27 — but treat the commercial terms as “correct as of that date” and glance at the live page before you pay.

☀️ AMO, the budget-minded cat

Free forever is real here, and that’s rarer than it sounds. 10 tasks is plenty to learn on and to keep a few ongoing scrapes running. 50,000 records a month, at no cost, covers a lot of small research, price-watching, and list-building. If your target sites don’t block hard and don’t throw CAPTCHAs, you may genuinely never need to pay.

The jump is the problem. The first paid tier, Standard, is US$83 a month billed monthly — or US$69 a month if you commit to a full year up front. That’s not a gentle step up from free; it’s the cost of a serious subscription, and you’re paying mostly for the cloud and the anti-blocking kit. For a student, a solo researcher, or anyone scraping cooperative sites, that’s hard to justify. AMO’s rule: ride the free tier until a real site actually beats you — a hard block, or a run too big for your own computer — and only then look at paying. Don’t pre-pay for cloud you haven’t needed yet.

🌙 PIMI, the performance-minded cat

Local extraction is the ceiling that matters. On free, your laptop is the engine: one device, your bandwidth, your uptime. A job that needs to run for hours, or on a schedule overnight, ties up a machine you can’t use and can’t close. Fine for a one-off. Painful for anything recurring.

The paid tiers are really about offloading that work. Standard gives 100 tasks and cloud extraction with 3 cloud concurrent processes — three scrapes running at once on Octoparse’s servers while your computer is off — plus IP rotation, CAPTCHA solving, and no export cap at all. That last part counts: the 10,000 and 50,000 ceilings disappear. Professional, at US$299 a month (US$249 if you pay annually), pushes to 250 tasks, 20 cloud concurrent processes, cloud task monitoring, direct sync to Google Sheets or S3, and a proper API — a way for your other software to pull the data automatically. PIMI’s read: free is a capable learning and small-job tool, but the moment “it has to run reliably, on time, without me babysitting it” enters the brief, you’re buying the cloud. The 3-versus-20 process gap is the real line between the two paid tiers.

Verdict: who should use it, who should skip it

Use the free plan if you’re learning, scraping cooperative sites, or pulling modest one-off datasets that fit under 10,000 records a run and 50,000 a month — and you don’t mind your own computer doing the work. It’s a genuine free tier, not a disguised trial.

Move to paid only when a concrete wall shows up: sites blocking you so you need IP rotation, CAPTCHA gates, exports bigger than the monthly cap, or jobs that must run on a schedule without your machine on. Standard at US$83/month (US$69 annual) buys the cloud and the anti-blocking tools. Professional at US$299/month (US$249 annual) is for teams running many scrapes in parallel and piping data straight into Sheets or an API.

One line to live by: if you can’t name the specific free-tier limit that’s blocking you, you’re not ready to pay yet.

Written: 2026-10-28 Price last verified: 2026-10-27 Tool last health-checked: 2026-10-28

🔗 Related on AMPM

• Octoparse pricing & free tier

📎 Sources

All prices and quotas in this article come from AMPM’s verified dataset for Octoparse (last verified 2026-10-27); primary sources:

• https://www.octoparse.com/pricing
• https://www.octoparse.com

🐾 Meet the cats: AMO and PIMI

AMPM is a Taiwan-based AI-tool pricing watchdog. Our motto: ask before you subscribe. Two cats argue every tool from two sides:

• ☀️ AMO — the budget-minded cat. Always asks: is the free tier enough, and is paying actually worth it?
• 🌙 PIMI — the performance-minded cat. Cares about whether it works well, fast, and gets your job done.

When they are done arguing, you know whether to pay. Every number is checked by us, with the verification date at the end.

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