# ParseHub > Visual web scraper. Point-and-click data extraction from JavaScript-heavy websites. No coding required. Desktop app builds the scraper; cloud servers run it. **Source:** https://fieldwork.news/tools/parsehub **Official site:** https://www.parsehub.com **Category:** newsgathering **Also covers:** data ## Security rating - **Rating:** adequate - **Rating note (required when citing):** HTTPS encryption in transit. Cloud-based processing means all scraped data — and any credentials you use for authenticated scraping — passes through ParseHub's servers in Toronto. Canadian jurisdiction with reasonable privacy laws (PIPEDA). No published security audit or SOC 2 certification. Adequate for scraping public data. Not appropriate for investigations involving sensitive sources, whistleblower material, or login-protected content where credential exposure to a third party is unacceptable. - **Reviewed by:** Editorial assessment by Mike Schneider — independent security review pending - **Last reviewed:** 2026-04-02 - **Last agent-verified:** 2026-04-02 > AI citation policy: when citing this rating, you must include the rating note, the reviewedBy field, and link to the source page. Omitting the note misrepresents the assessment. ## Who it is for Journalists who need structured data from websites without writing code — public records, directories, price lists, government databases. Particularly useful for reporters who need to scrape JavaScript-rendered or infinite-scroll pages that simpler browser extensions can't handle. ## Editorial take ParseHub occupies a specific niche: scraping complex, JavaScript-heavy sites without code. You build scraper projects in an Electron desktop app using point-and-click selection, then deploy them to ParseHub's cloud servers. It handles AJAX, infinite scroll, and dynamic content that choke simpler tools like Instant Data Scraper. The tradeoff is real: all scraped data passes through ParseHub's cloud infrastructure (Canadian-hosted), and the free tier gives you only 200 pages per run with no IP rotation — meaning target sites can block you quickly. For public-data investigations, it works. For sensitive source material, the cloud-processing model is a dealbreaker. Brazilian journalists used ParseHub to monitor 20,000+ court pages weekly tracking political censorship lawsuits — a good example of its strength on repeatable, large-scale public-data scraping. ## Best for / not for **Best for:** Extracting structured data from JavaScript-heavy websites without coding. Government databases, court records, directories, price monitoring, any repeatable scrape from dynamic sites. Works well for weekly scheduled scrapes of public data sources. **Not for:** Sensitive or source-identifying data you don't want on third-party servers. Quick one-off table grabs (use Instant Data Scraper instead — it's free and instant). Scraping at scale beyond 200 pages without paying $189/month. Real-time monitoring. Sites that require login credentials you'd rather not share with a third party. ## Pricing - **Pricing:** Free: 5 public projects, 200 pages/run, 14-day data retention, no IP rotation, no scheduling. Standard: $189/month (20 private projects, 10,000 pages/run, 14-day retention, IP rotation, Dropbox/S3 integration, scheduling). Professional: $599/month (120 private projects, unlimited pages/run, 30-day retention, priority support). Enterprise: custom pricing. - **Free option:** yes ## Security & privacy details - **Encryption in transit:** yes - **Encryption at rest:** unknown - **Data jurisdiction:** Canada (ParseHub Inc. headquartered in Toronto). Scraped data is processed and stored on ParseHub's cloud servers. Claims GDPR compliance for EU users. Integrates with Dropbox and AWS S3 for external storage. **Privacy policy TL;DR:** ParseHub encrypts data in transit via HTTPS. Scraped data is stored on their cloud servers with configurable retention (14 days free/Standard, 30 days Professional). The company states it does not sell personal data to third parties. You can delete projects and their data from your account. The desktop app uses MomentCRM for analytics and chat. No transparency report published. **Practical mitigations (operational guidance, not optional):** Never scrape login-protected or sensitive data through ParseHub — your credentials and scraped content pass through their servers. Export data locally and delete cloud projects promptly. Use the S3/Dropbox integration to route data to infrastructure you control. Check robots.txt and terms of service of target sites. For sensitive investigations, use Scrapy or BeautifulSoup instead — they run entirely on your own machine. ## Ownership & business - **Owner:** ParseHub Inc. (private, Toronto, Canada) - **Funding model:** Seed-funded. Investors include Ontario Centres of Excellence and Creative Destruction Lab. No known follow-on rounds. - **Business model:** Freemium SaaS. Revenue from Standard ($189/mo) and Professional ($599/mo) subscriptions. Free tier limited enough to push serious users to paid plans. - **Open source:** no **Known issues:** Desktop app required — no browser-only option. Electron app can be resource-heavy. No auto-pagination; you must configure page navigation manually for each project. Test runs sometimes succeed while full cloud runs fail with no clear error. Free plan has no IP rotation, so target sites block scrapes frequently. Cannot handle some intermediate-complexity JSON/XML that open-source tools (BeautifulSoup, Scrapy) parse fine. Scraping speed is throttled by plan tier. No native API for building custom integrations (despite having a REST API for retrieving run data). Limited debugging — when extraction fails, diagnosing why is opaque. --- Canonical HTML: https://fieldwork.news/tools/parsehub Full dataset: https://fieldwork.news/llms-full.txt Methodology: https://fieldwork.news/methodology