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Trafilatura

Free softwareOpen sourceLocal

Extract the main text and metadata from HTML articles and save clean content for research.

What you can use it for

Extract the main text and metadata from HTML articles and save clean content for research.

  • Extract article text and metadata from fetched or saved HTML.
  • Export a reusable JSON result without an API key or hosted plan.
Workflow coverage and comparison notes

Extract readable content from a known public page URL, instead of metered Firecrawl scrape, Tavily Extract, Exa Contents or ScrapingBee Markdown requests beyond their free allowances. Tavily and Exa already have recurring free plans. Covers the extraction step only: no web search, semantic index, deep research, managed proxy or browser interaction.

Before you switch

A Python library/CLI for content extraction, not a browser or search engine. Requires your own fetching, compute and bandwidth. Article heuristics can omit useful page sections. We did not test JavaScript-rendered pages, proxies, paywalls, full-site crawling or search.

Alternatives to these paid apps

Each comparison covers the workflow described above, rather than every paid feature.