Best Free Website Ripper

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Last updated by v.laurie on 25. November 2020 - 11:58

Introduction

Did you ever land on a website with many pages or lots of content that you were looking for but didn't have enough time to look through the site at the time? If so, then a website ripper is the software you needed to download the whole site to your computer.

Once downloaded you could then browse through the whole site whenever you wanted, even without an internet connection. The software products reviewed here are capable of downloading the whole website including the images, style sheets and everything else the site owners uploaded on the server. So, don’t worry about how the site looks when they get downloaded.

I hope that this review will help you to choose the right website ripper freeware that matches your requirements.

 

Rated Products

HTTrack  

An impressive product that does everything that you could want from a website ripper.

Our Rating: 
3.5
License: Free (Open source)
Available for multiple operating systems, highly configurable.
Not as easy to use as some other products.
Read full review...

PageNest  

Copy your favorite webpages to hard disk with this simple and easy-to-use website ripper.

Our Rating: 
3.5
License: Free (Limited features)
Simple and easy to use interface.
The Home tabs did not have icons, just the red X placeholders.
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Local Website Archive  

A free lite ripper allows you to download web pages and other documents on the web with good integration with browsers.

Our Rating: 
2.5
License: Free (Limited features)
Simple and easy to use interface.
Only able to save single web pages.
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Getleft  

An open-source freeware product that allows you to download entire web sites or single webpages.

Our Rating: 
2.5
License: Free (Open source)
Supports for multi platforms.
Only able to save single web pages.
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QuadSucker/Web  

A Website downloading tool capable of downloading four files at a time for faster download.

Our Rating: 
2.5
License: Free (Ads)
Simple and easy to use interface with multiple file downloads at a time.
Inefficient to restore the whole site functionalities to offline.
Read full review...

Related Products

Other software products to be reviewed:

  • WebRipper
  • WinWSD WebSite Downloader
  • WebFetch
  • wget + wget GUI
  • CyberArticle

 

Editor

This software review is copy-edited by Victor Laurie. Please help edit and improve this article by clicking here.

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Comments

There may be some confusion about the purpose of these programs. Downloading an entire website is one thing, but downloading entire individual pages alone from that website may possibly be considered something else.

I have been using HTTrack for about two years. If you want to download a mirror image of a website, it works well. If you want to pick and choose what to download beyond that, such as only one page of links within that site, it creates a mess.

Usually I start with only one page of a given website, and try to download everything on that one page, having no use for the other pages. I input the specific URL but HTTrack insists on downloading the entire root as well.

Moreover, if I want to exclude certain file types, I must input them one by one, but if I want to include those file types, I can choose them all with just a few clicks. Consequently, if I want to download only the text files, or html, or PDFs from a site, it is a longer process, as I have to manually exclude every other file type known to man.

There is also some confusion about how deeply to go for downloading links on the page in question: Does it download only linked files or does it download the files referenced on those linked files as well? You can choose how deep to go, but you won't know whether you selected the right option until the downloads are finished, half an hour later.

Today I have finally given up, as I think it would be faster to download manually the 100 text files on the web page in question, then to entrust HTTrack to do it automatically.

In all fairness I must say that I may have simply overlooked all the features that I needed or else missed them in the manual.

All in all, the programmer has been very generous to donate his work to the world, even though it may not be useful to me in particular, so for that he must be commended.

I tried a lot of these. Including Darcy Ripper, SiteSucker, Free download manager. But for me nothing seems to beat HTTrack. Although I've had some problems with it on command line with Linux.. but the HTTrack GUI for Windows has been more successful in some cases.

Darcy Ripper is the new website ripper that I use after being a long time user of WinHTTrack. It's platform independent. It has a pretty neat and good UI. Moreover it can be configured just like HTTrack and is pretty fast with less errors. One problem that I faced HTTrack was while viewing downloaded files when you have an active internet connection, it takes longer time to load the pages, compared to when you are offline, and it shows a forever loading page on the tab too.
Requires java, so it's a no-no for me, and I think it will put other users off too.
I thought the Java plugin on your browser is what's to be afraid of (which you can disable). Java on your desktop is just like Visual C++ components. As a programmer myself working with Java language and Android recently, I need to have it on my system, and it's a prerequisite. Am sure anyone in the same stream would be having that too.
I guess you are right :). And I have no idea if java on desktop is as vulnerable as the plugin or not.
The web browser plugin is actually the security problem in question which execute Java applets from websites. Web browsers (like Chrome, Firefox) by default disabled java plugin from your browser when it started facing zero day vulnerabilities which went way over the limit. The plug-in was designed to run Java programs in a security sandbox (like Flash Player), but when the sandbox itself had leaks/holes and was later exploited by hackers, there started the real problem. Just like Adobe Flash Player and PDF Reader, it's recommended to update Java to the latest version. Although steps have been taken to make Java more secure. A normal user doesn't need to have it installed on the system, particularly web browser

Hi, I used to use WinHTTrack, and beyond basic usage, it's options lend themselves to expert use. For a long time and again now I also found its GUI wasn't updating as it did originally whilst downloading.

Suddenly I thought of FDM (Free download manager).
As well as handling normal downloads and torrents, it also features site ripping (HTML spider).

http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/

That it does this is not obvious. Look at the Downloads tab- to the right is a double angle arrow. Click on this and you see more tabs, including

HTML Spider.

Much simpler than WinHTTrack.

Finding the options is tricky.

Rt click on the URL of the page you are to download when added to FDM and look for "Web page downloading settings"

thanks for that info. I was able to use the portable version that I already had on my HD. Problem free.

I spend a lot time with HTTrack and sometime its take a lot time andI think PageNest have an option better than HTTrack. thats auto-collect what should download. PageNest auto-collect pages are link prefer and do not download it. it save much time!

Excuse me, I am looking for something that can schedule automatic download of web page, and it can loop for certain duration, e.g. start copying a web at everyday morning10am and continue downloading every 10 minutes till 16pm, which of these software can meet this requirement?
Thanks

It looks like FDM Downloader could, for example. See the Scheduler tab.

New version of HTTrack: Version 3.48-13 (06/08/2014)

am having a really bad time with page nest, pc freezes, there are no step by step instructions [yes ive read the instructions] .

can anyone suggest a dedicated forum of some clear instructions ......getting desperate to copy my site before my subscription runs out, if u can help pls dont delay

thanks

There are other suggestions on this review. Why don't you try them?

pls explain what u mean by that

What I mean to say is that you have tried just one program, Page Nest. This review contains other software which you can use and backup the website. Why don't you try other software that are mentioned in this review?

thanks but i tryed first choice, even harder to use, ive invested so much time in this one im sticking to it and slowly learning