No-Code Scrapers with Ziny Setup

You absolutely need competitor prices, qualified lead lists, or in-depth market data to stay competitive in 2025. However, when you search for web scraping solutions, you get immediately overwhelmed. You could hire a developer for $8,000+/month, outsource to a scraping agency for $5,000+/project, or you can roll up your sleeves and learn Python yourself. This may means weeks of tutorials and googling Stack Overflow errors before you get your first data point.

There is an easier way that levels the playing field for everyone. Scraping websites with no-code solutions like Apify, BrowserAct, and Outscraper along with Ziny’s residential proxies gives you enterprise-grade scraping capabilities in about 30 minutes flat. Ready to extract hundreds of thousands of data points for free this very second?

Choose Your Scraping Tool (5 Minutes)

The first step is to simply pick the tool you want to use. There are three fantastic options here that each excel in different use cases and learning curves. It’s mainly about finding the best fit for your needs right now.

Apify — The Power User’s Choice

Apify has the largest catalog of scrapers to date with over 1,500 pre-built scrapers ready to start extracting right now. It ranges from Google Maps to Instagram, LinkedIn to Amazon and many more. The tool excels when you want to chain together complex multi-step workflows. It can also create custom scrapers from scratch using the built-in visual editor. The tradeoff is a steeper learning curve vs the other options.

Choose Apify if you want:

• 1,500+ pre-built scrapers for any website
• Multi-step workflows, sophisticated data pipelines
• Developer-level access through a public API
• Enterprise-grade flexibility and configuration options
• Automate scraping with scheduled runs

Skip Apify if you don’t want to spend any time learning or just need to scrape Google data.

Cost: $49-$499/month depending on usage + proxy costs
Free Trial: $5 in credits, no credit card required to start

BrowserAct — The Easiest Tool

BrowserAct is a modern web scraper that uses AI to completely remove technical hurdles. Instead of manually defining selectors and data schema, you write instructions in plain English. E.g “extract all the prices on this page” and the AI takes care of the rest automatically. The visual drag-and-drop workflow builder is incredibly intuitive and transparent even for the absolute beginner. Most impressively, the AI also dynamically adapts to changes on websites in the background so you no longer need to constantly maintain scrapers.

Choose BrowserAct if you want:

• 100% natural language commands with zero technical setup
• Visual no-code interface that’s completely intuitive
• AI that automatically adapts when websites change
• The absolute easiest learning curve possible for newbies
• Visualize exactly what’s happening in real time

Skip BrowserAct if you’re strapped for cash or need high volume scraping across thousands of niche websites.

Cost: Credits-based system, typically 80-250 credits per scraping task
Free Trial: Available through AppSumo deals and promotional offers

Outscraper — The Google Specialist

Outscraper is different from the other tools in that it has carved out a very specific niche. It specializes in Google’s own platforms like Google Maps, Google Search, and Google Shopping. Outscraper is able to offer the most transparent and lowest cost per result. The main downside is scope since with only about 20 scrapers available you can’t use it for social media or general e-commerce scraping. But within its narrow use case, it’s the best in class in terms of both simplicity and cost.

Choose Outscraper if you want:

• Google Maps businesses with verified email addresses
• Google Search results to track and analyze for SEO
• Google Shopping prices for monitoring and tracking
• Pay-as-you-go pricing with no fixed monthly commitment
• The absolute simplest user interface and minimal configuration

Skip Outscraper if you need to scrape social networks or general e-commerce sites.

Cost: Approximately $3 per 1,000 results extracted
Free Trial: 500 free results immediately upon signup

Set Up Ziny Proxies (5 Minutes)

Why Proxies Aren’t Optional

It is obvious to any website that you’re running an automated bot when your scraper hits hundreds or thousands of times. Especially from the exact same IP address in a short period. Residential proxies like Ziny solve this problem by routing your requests through different real residential IP addresses.

To the website you look like hundreds of thousands of genuine users browsing from all over the world. This is the fundamental difference between getting blocked in 5 minutes and successfully scraping millions of data points over several months without a hitch.

Types of Proxies in a Nutshell

Ziny offers three types of proxies to match your needs. Residential proxies offer the best balance of anonymity and success rates for most use cases. Mobile proxies enjoy the highest trust levels from websites at the expense of higher cost. Finally, datacenter proxies are the fastest but at the cost of detection (each has its place).

In general, residential proxies are your best choice for scraping projects. The others are best reserved for highly specialized use cases.

Step 1: Get Your Ziny Credentials

The setup process is very simple and takes under two minutes. 

Go to dashboard.ziny.io in your browser and complete the ultra fast 60-second signup process. You’ll be immediately logged into your dashboard and ready to go. Click on the “Premium Residential” tab in your dashboard navigation. You’ll see your proxy credentials prominently displayed.

Copy and paste the two credentials somewhere safe:

USERNAME
PASSWORD

Step 2: Understand Your Proxy Formats

The basic proxy format works on all platforms and scraping tools. It’s a standard HTTP proxy URL that combines your credentials with Ziny’s proxy server details. Below is the most commonly used proxy format:

http://YOUR_USERNAME:[email protected]:8000

The advanced feature that sets Ziny apart is the ability to target very specific locations with the proxies. When you need to extract location-specific data, regional pricing, etc., you must use geo-targeting. For Ziny, this is as simple as adding your desired country to the username like this:

http://YOUR_USERNAME-country-US:[email protected]:8000

Replace US with any 2-letter country code. UK for United Kingdom, DE for Germany, CA for Canada, AU for Australia, etc. across over 195 countries.

Ziny even offers multi-page scraping support with sticky sessions. This helps to maintain the exact same IP address for hours or days at a time. Sticky sessions is 100% required when scraping paginated results, or you need to keep a session alive for multiple requests. The format is:

http://YOUR_USERNAME-session-abc123:[email protected]:8000

Replace abc123 with any unique session ID you want. Ziny will keep the same IP for 24 hours or until you change the session ID.

Setup Guides for Each Platform

Apify Setup (12 Minutes)

Let’s build a scraper that extracts 100 coffee shops from Google Maps including business names, full addresses, phone numbers, star ratings, and total review counts. The exact same process applies to any Google Maps scraping use case.

Step-by-step process:

1. Go to apify.com and click the big green “Sign up free” button at the top right. After confirming your email, you’ll get $5 of free credits. Log in and visit the “Store” in the top navigation bar to access Apify’s marketplace of over 1,500 pre-built scrapers. Search for “Google Maps Scraper” and click the official one created by Apify themselves (it will have a verified Apify badge). Click “Try for free” to launch the configuration UI.
   
2. In the basic settings section, paste your search query exactly as you would type it into Google Maps itself. In this example we’ll use coffee shops in the San Francisco area. Specify 100 max results for testing and select output format.
   
3. Scroll down to “Proxy Configuration” and click the dropdown arrow. Choose “Custom proxies” and in the input box that appears, paste your Ziny proxy URL with geo-targeting.
   
4. Hit the big “Start” button. Apify will launch a cloud browser instance that routes all requests through Ziny’s residential proxies. You’ll see real-time status updates including how many results have been extracted and the current success rate. The entire scrape should finish in 2-5 minutes.
   
5. Click the “Dataset” tab to see the results. Click “Export” and select “Download CSV” to get your full dataset with all the structured data ready for immediate use.

BrowserAct Setup (10 Minutes)

In this example we’re going to build an AI scraper that extracts product information from any e-commerce site using nothing but plain English.

Step-by-step process:

1. Go to browseract.com and sign up using your email. You’ll get a confirmation email immediately – this is just to verify the account is really yours. The UI itself is purpose-built for absolute beginners who have never written a line of code.

2. Click the “+ Create” button you’ll see prominently in the center of the dashboard. Name your agent something recognizable like “Amazon Price Scraper” so you can identify it later when you have multiple agents active.

3. Before writing scraping instructions, click “Browser Settings” in the left sidebar. This is the absolutely crucial step that most users miss entirely. For Region, choose “United States” or whatever primary audience country your target website serves. Choose “Residential” for IP Type to ensure you use Ziny’s most reliable proxies. Toggle “Proxy Configuration” on and paste your Ziny URL with geo-targeting.

http://YOUR_USERNAME-country-US:[email protected]:8000

4. Now type your scraping instructions in casual conversational English in the large textbox:

• Visit [paste your Amazon product URL here]
• Extract the product title
• Extract the current price
• Extract the star rating
• Extract the total number of reviews
• Export everything to a CSV file. When complete, simply click “Run Agent” and watch in the browser UI as the scraper agent executes your commands in real time: clicking elements, scrolling down, extracting data exactly as you told it to. Once finished, click “Export” and “CSV” to download the results.

Outscraper Setup (8 Minutes)

In this example we’re going to extract 500 local businesses from Google Maps with verified email addresses included– perfect for B2B lead generation or local market research.

Step-by-step process:

1. Visit outscraper.com and go through the signup process. You’ll get 500 free results immediately so you can validate the quality before committing to a paid plan. Importantly, no credit card is required upfront so you can try it out risk-free.

2. Click the “Services” menu in the main navigation bar and scroll down to find “Google Maps Email Extractor”. The “Email Extractor” not only pulls business data but also finds and verifies email addresses associated with those businesses. Click “Start Scraping” to open the configuration page.

3. In the search query field, paste the exact search you would type in Google Maps. In this example, we’ll scrape restaurants in Chicago. Set the maximum results to 500 so you make full use of your free trial. Language is already set to English and the country to United States.

4. Scroll all the way down to the “Advanced Settings” section and toggle “Proxy Settings” on. In the text box that appears, paste your Ziny URL.

5. Click the big “Extract” button and wait 3-5 minutes. When complete, click “Download” and select either CSV or XLSX to receive structured data with business names, addresses, phone numbers, verified emails, websites, and star ratings.

Real-World Workflows That Drive ROI

Workflow 1: Automate Daily Competitor Price Monitoring

Use Apify’s Amazon Product Scraper to track your competitor prices automatically. Point the scraper at specific competitor product pages instead of using search queries. Schedule to run at 6 AM every morning as you sleep. Direct the output straight into a Google Sheet via Apify’s built-in integration. Add conditional formatting to turn any cell red where prices drop more than 5%.

The end result is waking up to already updated pricing intelligence every single morning with zero manual work. You see your competitors change prices before they gain market share, and you can adjust your prices in response first.

Investment: $59/month total (Apify + Ziny)
ROI: Saves $941/month compared to hiring a freelancer = $11,292 annually

Workflow 2: B2B Lead Generation Machine

Use Outscraper’s Google Maps Email Extractor with super-targeted search queries such as “marketing agencies in New York” or “SaaS companies in San Francisco”. Configure the scraper to extract 1,000 such businesses along with verified email addresses, phone numbers, and websites. Use sticky session proxies to handle pagination smoothly. Import all results straight into HubSpot or Salesforce via simple CSV upload.

The end result is 1,000 verified leads with all contact info in you have in about 1 hour of work. For comparison, buying leads from a data broker is $0.50-$2.00 per lead so you would pay $500-$2,000 for that same data.

Investment: $75/month (Outscraper + Ziny)
ROI: Saves $2,425/month compared to buying leads = $29,100 annually

Workflow 3: Comprehensive Market Research Report

Combine all three tools for the most comprehensive competitive intelligence. Start with Outscraper to scrape Google Search rankings for your target keywords. Use Apify to scrape your competitors websites to get pricing pages and extract product features. Finally, use BrowserAct to extract detailed product specifications and customer reviews from top 10 competitors. Merge all the data in Excel for an in-depth competitive analysis.

The end result is a complete market analysis report you would normally pay $5,000+ to consultants to produce, all delivered in a single afternoon with real data on competitor pricing, feature matrices, market positioning, and customer sentiment.

Investment: $100-150 one-time
ROI: Saves $4,850 compared to hiring consultants

Troubleshooting Common Issues

Problem: “Proxy Authentication Failed”

If you see this error message, it means your scraper cannot connect to Ziny’s servers with your credentials. Go back to dashboard.ziny.io and recopy your username and password very carefully. Ensure there are no extra spaces before or after. Ensure you have the correct format:

http://username:[email protected]:8000

Problem: Success Rate Below 80%

Your scraper finishes with a low success rate, meaning the website has partially detected your bot. Add sticky session to your proxy username to keep same IP for whole scrape (-session-abc123). Lower your speed to 5-10 requests per minute rather than flooding the website. Match the proxy country with the target website’s primary region.

Problem: Missing Data Fields

Some fields are blank even though the scraper completed successfully. Increase wait time to 3-5 seconds so JS has time to load dynamic content. Turn on JS rendering in the scraper’s advanced settings. Check to see if the website recently changed their layout or design.

Problem: Burning Credits Too Fast

You notice you are using credits way too fast than anticipated because of inefficient setup. Lower your max results to 10-20 during testing then scale up later. Paginate intelligently instead of loading everything at once. Filter during the scrape, don’t scrape everything and filter later.

Final Thoughts and Next Steps

Web scraping doesn’t have to be a game of “Go big or go home.” You don’t need thousands of engineers and a billionaire’s budget to be competitive. Now you have the tools, the know-how, and the proxy backbone to scrape data as easily as a Fortune 500 CTO. Fortune 500 companies don’t get competitive data in 5 days on white-labeled custom solutions for $15k/month, they get it right now using Ziny on a shoestring budget.

Your action plan for today: Sign up for Ziny and store your proxy credentials safely. Choose one tool depending on your primary use case. Apify for general purposes, BrowserAct for “just works,” or Outscraper for scraping Google. Make a test scrape with a small batch of data to confirm everything is set up correctly. Validate your data quality and success rate to ensure that you’ve properly set everything up.

Questions? Reach out to Ziny support at [email protected] for personalized help with your specific scraping needs.