Whether you’re looking for email addresses, industry insights, information on competitors, or sales leads, web scraping is a valuable tool. It lets you harvest data from multiple web pages automatically, saving lots of time.
Web scraping is what Hexomatic aims to do better than any other versatile web scraping tool out there. It captures many types of data by using AI and over 100 automated integrations.
If you’re wondering whether Hexomatic is a good choice for your website and business, we’ll help you understand its strengths and weaknesses.
Hexomatic: The Good and the Bad
Hexomatic will primarily appeal to those who have prior experience with web scraping thanks to its extensive AI toolset. However, it can be challenging for novices to figure out the payment structure if you don’t know exactly which subscription tier fits your needs.
What Hexomatic Is Good At
Versatile options for web scraping: Hexomatic provides a variety of web scraping tools that can give you a leg up in a few different areas, such as:
- Research: Pull data automatically from your own websites and from your competitors, so you can learn where you may need to make changes.
- Marketing: Streamline much of the marketing on your website, including auditing, to determine what advertising is doing well and what to improve.
- Sales: Find leads with data that helps you adjust your sales techniques to close more deals.
With Hexomatic, you can set up your own automated tasks, or use built-in tasks. Either way, it’s easy to create an end-to-end workflow and let it run without any intervention.
Helps to improve your website: Hexomatic helps you find and track backlinks for your website or a competitor’s page and learn where to add more using SEO meta tags.
You can use Hexomatic to audit your own web presence too, staying up to date on accessibility and usability issues. It scans for grammar or spelling errors to help you fix issues that could cause visitors to lose trust in your website.
If you need help cropping images for social media channels, Hexomatic can automate the process. Finally, it has a built-in tool to test your web pages for mobile devices and make changes rather than using a trial-and-error approach.
Find and contact potential sales leads: Hexomatic helps you collect email addresses listed on other websites, the WHOIS information about a particular domain, and other research data. It also sets you up to contact those people directly.
If those addresses are not active, you aren’t going to be able to use them, of course. In such cases, Hexomatic verifies email addresses and ensures they are accurate.
Hexomatic also has an integration that helps you find contact information about sellers on Amazon. You can pull information about the ratings of each seller and find those who have the best reputation.
Take advantage of AI automation tools: Hexomatic regularly introduces new features in AI automation.
For example, Hexomatic offers advanced tools that work with ChatGPT. You can analyze data scraped from various websites and use prompts built into its software, or build your own. Or harness ChatGPT to automatically create and rewrite content for your website and craft social media posts.
Keep in mind that AI tools are not part of the base subscription package at this point, only the higher-level plans.
Constantly adding new features: Hexomatic’s creators add other new features to the service at regular intervals. In just a few months during our testing, Hexomatic added dozens of new automations to its lineup, some built-in and some paid.
Of course, one of the drawbacks to having a constantly evolving service is that some features may change. Hexomatic discontinued one of its pricing tiers recently, for instance. However, the overall benefits of having a changing service outweigh these frustrations in most cases.
Learn more about web scraping: Hexomatic has multiple resources to educate you on the details of web scraping through its blog full of tutorials.
It’s easy to learn about the basics or expand your knowledge on specific tasks in the field of web scraping.
Still, you need to subscribe to the Enterprise plan to receive extensive customer service help outside of the basic educational resources. At this higher level you get access to a dedicated strategy consultant and personalized onboarding.
Hexomatic’s Potential Drawbacks
Complex pricing structure: Hexomatic’s pricing structure is based on automation credits, which can be difficult for small businesses and new web scraping pros to understand.
You may struggle to know how many credits you need each month. For many novices, it’s best to stick with a month-to-month pricing plan until you figure out your actual needs.
Adding premium credits is also a challenge. For example, if you purchase 105 premium credits for $9.99, you end up paying 0.0006 premium credits per character for Google Translate services, a fraction that’s hardly intuitive to keep in mind.
To its credit, Hexomatic does give you an estimate of how many characters and words your credits will cover. If you want to split the premium credits over several tasks, however, the calculation is very tricky to do yourself.
Limited information on automation credits: Hexomatic’s pricing page doesn’t do a good job explaining what automation credits are, or how to use them.
Most built-in automations require one credit, but some cost more if you are downloading more than one file or performing a more complex automation. Using credits for built-in automations works differently than using add-on premium credits. It’s far too confusing.
You’ll have to do research on the different automations that interest you and make sure you know which ones work with built-in credits and which ones require add-on credits. If you remain unsure, reach out to the Hexomatic sales team for help.
Must provide a payment method for the free trial: When you sign up for the seven-day free trial, you have to provide payment information before accessing the Silver plan. Only subscribers can use the Gold plan.
Should you fail to cancel the service before the free trial period expires, Hexomatic will automatically charge you at the monthly rate.
Some people may be wary of giving Hexomatic payment details just for the free trial period. We’d prefer to try the software and decide if we want to subscribe first.
No option for web scraping social media: Although Hexomatic can scrape many of the websites from which you’d like to obtain data, it cannot yet pull data from most social media accounts.
You can’t set up automated liking or following on social media accounts like Instagram or Facebook, either. Nevertheless, Hexomatic recently added support for YouTube video scraping and Twitter data collection, a welcome improvement.
Hexomatic Plans and Pricing
Hexomatic offers three pricing plans, plus a premium add-on option. At every tier, you’re free to create your own web scraping recipes, automate tasks, and use all of the AI-powered automated services.
You pay your subscription month-by-month or annually, which comes with a discount equal to two free months of services per year. However, annual payers can’t cancel the service or receive a refund for unused time as easily as monthly subscribers.
Silver
The Silver plan gives you 4,500 automation credits to use during the month. You can schedule up to 10 simultaneous running workflows.
This tier costs $49 per month on the monthly plan and $490 annually (or $40.83 per month).
Gold
The Gold plan contains all of the features and services found in the Silver plan, along with access to the API and unlimited simultaneous workflows. The base Gold plan offers 10,000 monthly automation credits.
However, you can also customize the number of automation credits you want. The base price is $99 month-by-month or $990 annually, while 100,000 automation credits will cost $990 monthly or $9,990 per year with several other levels available between the two. There is no discount for purchasing more credits than 100,000.
Enterprise
When you want a customized set of features, you can contact the sales team and subscribe to the Enterprise plan. You receive everything in the Gold plan, plus:
- Personalized onboarding
- Training
- Campaign setup and management
- A dedicated strategy consultant
Hexomatic does not list a price for the Enterprise tier. The cost depends on the specific features you select and the automation credits you need.
Premium Credit Add-ons
Purchasing Premium add-ons allow you to access and analyze web-scraped data collected through ChatGPT, Google Maps, SEO backlinks, DeepL, Google Translate, Amazon Data, and more.
You receive 105 premium credits for $9.99 per month. Different premium features carry variable premium credit costs.
Final Thoughts
For those starting out with web scraping, Hexomatic’s versatility and ease of use puts it ahead of many competitors that only scrape certain types of data. Advanced users can create their own scraping recipes, too.
However, the pricing structure is needlessly complicated and the free trial period is too short. Hexomatic also cannot web scrape social media. To be sure, Hexomatic will meet the needs of quite a few website owners, but calculating costs ahead of time is a challenge.
