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.
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!
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.