Diffbot Reviews & Product Details

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Diffbot provides great APIs, technical resource, and overall service. Their technical resources are one of the most advanced and highly accurate. Diffbot's team keeps their APIs up to date with social media's rapid evolution. The customer support is equally helpful and very friendly. They are very willing to work with flexible scenarios, accommodate needs and low budgets for small research groups, provide demo and trial accounts to experiment. Overall, they are the best social media data provider and analysis company, in my experience of over a decade. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

This is more like a suggestion. Diffbot has several excellent capabilities and they are constantly improving and adding new features. Current customers and perhaps prospective ones too would benefit from a weekly/monthly newsletter, or social media updates, about these new developments. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

High detection accuracy and uptime: most of the time we can send API requests and know that the responses from Diffbot will be valid. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Some old versions of Python are used (<3.0) and could be upgraded. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We've been using both the Knowledge Graph and Enhance products. We use the Knowledge Graph for a wider search, finding individuals with certain job titles at certain orgs. Then we enrich those profiles with Enhance, together it's a great market research and lead enrichment set up. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We don't need all of Diffbot's offerings. (At least for now.) Their APIs and crawler aren't super applicable to our use case at the moment. With that said, seeing what type of well-formed data is returned from other Diffbot products makes us think we could find a use for these down the road. We aren't a technical team. So this aspect of Diffbot's products isn't really applicable to us... but from what I understand we should be able to easily find an individual who can help us make better use of Diffbot's more technical products. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Before using Diffbot, we considered building our own scraping system. This would have cost us at least 4 weeks of development time up-front and 1-2 days of maintenance cost on a monthly basis. The time itself is valuable, but even more so when considering the opportunity cost of what that time could be spent doing in an early-stage startup.

After integrating Diffbot, we have that time back to building our business, developing exciting features for our customers and growing our customer base. The API has been reliable and the data that Diffbot is retrieving adds value to our customers with every content brief that is created. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

No downsides so far. We're getting value out of their service and would recommend to anyone looking for a reliable content extraction API. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The ability to enhance my existing data. I have company information imported from other sources such as Crunchbase. With a simple script in Google Sheets, I was able to enhance the company information with things like employee skills, common employee titles, technology stack used, and recent articles about the company. As a result, I was able to better prioritize my leads and quickly filter out the unqualified ones, saving me time.

The ease of finding new leads. I can search new companies based on industry tags, employee size, funding amount, technology stack, and employee skills chained together with complex logic using a powerful query language. The number of high quality leads I found through the Diffbot Knowledge Graph more than tripled the number of high quality leads I found from other imported sources. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There's a bit of a learning curve to the Diffbot Query Language if you are not used to forming database queries. But their support team is pretty helpful, and one you work out a few examples and get used to building queries, you will realize just how powerful your searches can become. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Working with just one engineer, we were able to get a simple integration going within a week. We used the Article API to scale up and improve something we had already been doing in-house but didn't have the necessary resources to justify doing on our own. Diffbot allowed us to outsource something that was not a core focus and use those freed up resources to scale up other aspects of our infrastructure. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Not much really. Our rep keeps reminding us we're only using a fraction of what we could be using. One of these days we'll have the time to explore some of the higher-level knowledge graph APIs, one of these days. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Diffbot can augment data streams for SO MANY industries/use cases. Within ours we're able to keep track of news mentions on universities (from literally all over the web), and enrich leads for outreach. I'm sure there's a ton more we could be doing with Diffbot. But even with those uses the service has paid for itself many times over. It doesn't take many saved work hours to justify the $299 price tag... Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

To tap into the full power of Diffbots offerings you do need a technical team member. (But for what service is this not the case?) Basically you can deal with pre-extracted sites (of which there seem to be millions) with the Knowledge Graph and Enhance. If you want to crawl a specific site repeatedly you'll need to at least know hot to make an API call. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.