Instant Data Scraper alternative — free, and still maintained.

Instant Data Scraper was built by Web Robots, a B2B web-scraping services company. The extension was the free, friendly front door to a paid enterprise business: click the icon, let it guess which block of the page holds your data, download a CSV. It benchmarked well against Amazon, eBay, Craigslist, Walmart, Etsy, Yellow Pages and similar listing sites, and it became the default recommendation in more "how to scrape without code" tutorials than anyone can count.

Today, the top line of Web Robots' own Instant Data page reads: "Instant Data is no longer owned, developed or supported by Web Robots." The rest of the page — the feature list, the how-to-use steps — is still there, unchanged, describing a product the company has divested. The listing is still live and the extension still installs.

It is worth being precise about what that does and does not mean. It does notmean the extension is malicious, broken, or about to disappear. It does mean nobody has publicly claimed responsibility for maintaining a tool that, by design, runs on whatever page you point it at and reads its contents. There are circulating claims online about what the new owners have done with it; we have not verified any of them and won't repeat them here. The documented fact — the vendor's own statement — is enough reason for most people to at least know what their options are.

ScrapeMaster is a free Chrome extension from the Actually Useful Extensions project. Click the icon and it opens in a side panel, analyses the page, and produces an editable table of the repeating data it found — products, job posts, directory listings, search results, plain HTML tables — usually in two to four seconds. You rename or drop columns in place, then export.

Past that first table it does three things Instant Data Scraper doesn't. It follows links: turn on "Follow detail" and it opens each row's link in a background tab and pulls fields from the detail page, so a listing of 200 products becomes 200 rows with the per-product data that never appeared on the listing page. It exports JSON and copies to the clipboard in a format that pastes cleanly into Google Sheets, not just CSV and XLSX. And it remembers: columns, pagination rules and detail-follow settings are saved per domain and reapplied the next time you visit that site.

It is free with no paid tier and no row limits, and it asks for no account. It is also newer, much smaller, Chromium-only, and has a handful of public reviews at the time of writing. If you weight track record heavily, that is a fair reason to hesitate.

Web Robots states that Instant Data Scraper "runs completely in user's browser and does not send data to Web Robots". Its table-guessing is entirely local.

ScrapeMaster's is not. When you trigger auto-detect, the page's HTML structure— the skeleton of tags, classes and nesting, not the text inside them — is sent to our analysis API, which returns suggested selectors. The actual extraction, the pagination crawl, the detail-page visits and the export all happen locally in your browser. But it is one network request, and calling ScrapeMaster "fully local" would be untrue, so we don't.

If your rule is "this tool must never talk to a server", that rule points at Instant Data Scraper, and we'd rather you know that from this page than find out later.

Twelve dimensions that actually change your workflow. The Instant Data Scraper column is sourced from Web Robots' own product page and the extension's store listing, checked in September 2026.

This is the single biggest functional gap. Instant Data Scraper works on listing pages: whatever is visible in the repeating block, it can take. Anything that lives one click deeper — the full spec table on a product page, the description on a job post, the email address on a directory entry — it cannot reach, because it never leaves the listing.

ScrapeMaster's "Follow detail" opens each row's link in a background tab, extracts the fields you picked, and merges them into the same table. In practice this is the difference between a spreadsheet of names and prices and a spreadsheet you can actually work from. It is also slower and heavier on the target site, so pace it with the delay setting.

Both tools crawl multiple pages. Instant Data Scraper asks you to locate the "Next" button manually — you click its "Locate Next button" control, then click the button on the page — and handles infinite scroll automatically, detecting when new data stops loading. Crawl delay defaults to one second and is adjustable for slow, dynamically-loading pages.

ScrapeMaster detects four patterns without being told: next-page buttons, load-more buttons, numbered pagination and infinite scroll. Numbered pagination — the "1 2 3 … 47" strip common on directories and job boards — is the one that most often trips up a next-button-only approach. Delay is configurable the same way.

Instant Data Scraper gives you CSV and XLSX, downloadable at any point during a crawl. Its own documentation is candid that the output needs work: it says the file "will most likely have some unwanted additional fields" and that column names will probably need renaming. That cleanup happens in Excel, after the fact.

ScrapeMaster names columns during detection and lets you rename or remove them in the side panel before you export, so the cleanup happens once rather than on every download. Exports are CSV, XLSX, JSON, or a clipboard copy shaped for a direct paste into Google Sheets — useful if your workflow ends in a Sheet rather than a file.

Neither tool is an anti-bot solution and neither claims to be. Both run through your ordinary browser session with your ordinary fingerprint. Neither rotates proxies. Neither solves CAPTCHAs, defeats logins or gets past paywalls. On aggressively-protected sites — LinkedIn, anything behind a hostile Cloudflare configuration — heavy extraction will get you throttled or blocked with either extension, and the only real lever is slowing down.

Scraping publicly visible data is broadly lawful in most jurisdictions, but re-publishing copyrighted content, breaching a site's terms, or collecting personal data subject to GDPR or CCPA are not things a tool can make safe for you. Both are neutral instruments; the responsibility is the operator's.

• Zero network requests is a hard requirement. Its detection is local; ours is not. If policy or principle says the tool must never phone home, this is decisive.
• You already have a working setup. If it scrapes the three sites you care about and you export CSV to Excel anyway, there is nothing here that will make your week better.
• You want a tool with a long paper trail. Years of installs, tutorials, forum threads and StackOverflow answers exist for it. ScrapeMaster has this page and its docs.
• You need its Edge store listing specifically. ScrapeMaster runs on Edge as a Chromium browser, but Instant Data Scraper has a first-party Edge listing.

• You want a maintained tool. Someone answers when something breaks.
• Your data lives on detail pages. Emails, specs, descriptions, full job posts — anything one click past the listing.
• The site uses numbered pagination. Auto-detected rather than manually marked.
• Your output is JSON or a Google Sheet. Not a CSV you then have to import.
• You scrape the same sites repeatedly. Saved per-domain configuration turns a five-minute setup into one click.

Instant Data Scraper is a good tool that lost its owner. It still runs, it still guesses tables well, and its zero-network design is something we can't match. If that combination is what you need, keep it — this page exists to inform a choice, not to talk you out of one.

If what you need is a scraper someone is still maintaining, one that follows links into detail pages, auto-detects numbered pagination, exports JSON or straight into Sheets, and remembers your setup per site — that is what ScrapeMaster was built to do, for free, without an account.

You can install it from the Chrome Web Store, read the full 109-question FAQ, or check the privacy policy to see exactly what that one network request contains before you decide.