Diffbot APIs

What do you like best about the product?

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 the product?

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 the product 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.

What do you like best about the product?

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 the product?

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 the product 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.

What do you like best about the product?

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 the product?

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 the product 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.

What do you like best about the product?

1) Enrichment data
2) Ability to query data in aggregate

What do you dislike about the product?

1) Being charged based on entities
2) Being charged as we go (I wish there was a way to limit my queries)

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Lead enrichment
Lead sourcing
Customer profiling

What do you like best about the product?

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 the product?

Some old versions of Python are used (<3.0) and could be upgraded.

What problems is the product 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.