Saturday, June 7, 2025
finlight vs Scrapingdog: Structured News vs Scraped Content for Financial Applications
When building tools that rely on fresh news — whether for trading, macro research, or market intelligence — developers often choose between structured APIs and custom scraping solutions. Two platforms offering fundamentally different approaches are Scrapingdog and finlight.
In this article, we’ll compare these services from the perspective of data reliability, use case flexibility, and ease of integration, so you can pick the right approach for your project.
What Are They?
- Scrapingdog is a general-purpose web scraping API that simplifies the process of extracting data from public websites. It handles proxies, CAPTCHAs, and headless browsers behind the scenes.
- finlight is a curated news delivery API purpose-built for finance, trading, and geopolitics — offering structured, full-text articles, sentiment scoring, and real-time streaming.
🔍 Feature Comparison Table
| Feature | Scrapingdog | finlight |
|---|---|---|
| Type | General web scraper | Curated news API |
| Data Source | Any public web page | Trusted financial sources (Reuters, WSJ, etc.) |
| Full article access | Yes (via scraping target sites) | Yes (included in API responses) |
| Sentiment analysis | No (requires separate processing) | Yes (included) |
| Real-time delivery | Possible, but must scrape repeatedly | Yes (instant via REST & WebSocket) |
| WebSocket support | No | Yes |
| Geo/Finance specialization | No | Yes |
| Custom logic | Requires custom scrapers and parsing | Built-in filters, tags, and search logic |
| Legal/data rights | Website-dependent, risk of ToS violations | Licensed and aggregated legally |
| Integration effort | High (manual HTML parsing) | Low (structured JSON API) |
| Ideal for | Crawling general content, custom dashboards | Market alerts, financial research tools |
Key Differences
1. Use Case Orientation
- Scrapingdog is a flexible tool for scraping any site — useful when no API exists or you need very specific content not found elsewhere.
- finlight is a vertical-specific platform delivering structured news from trusted financial and geopolitical sources, optimized for machine analysis and real-time decisions.
2. Speed & Latency
- Scraping introduces latency (you must wait for the site to render/load), and it’s usually pull-based.
- finlight offers push-based real-time updates, including WebSocket streaming, critical for financial alerts and reactive systems.
3. Content Reliability
- With Scrapingdog, you're on your own when it comes to:
- Structuring data
- Handling website layout changes
- Managing duplicates, source quality, or legal access
- finlight abstracts all of that with curated, normalized, and licensed content, making it a better fit for professional environments where compliance and reliability matter.
4. Developer Experience
- Scrapingdog simplifies scraping infrastructure but still requires you to build:
- Custom HTML parsers
- Duplicate filtering
- NLP/sentiment logic
- finlight provides:
- Structured output (JSON)
- Built-in sentiment scoring
- Clean metadata
- Pre-filtered finance/geopolitical context
Who Should Use What?
| Use Case | Best Fit |
|---|---|
| You want to scrape arbitrary content from various sites | Scrapingdog |
| You need full articles with structured sentiment metadata | finlight |
| You're building a custom scraper or aggregator | Scrapingdog |
| You’re creating a financial alerting or trading system | finlight |
| You care about compliance and clean, licensed content | finlight |
| You're scraping niche sites without API access | Scrapingdog |
| You need real-time updates via WebSocket | finlight |
Conclusion
Scrapingdog gives you full control over scraping any web content — ideal for niche or hard-to-access websites without APIs. But with that power comes the burden of maintenance, legal complexity, and slower response time.
finlight is the go-to if you need instant, structured, and sentiment-enriched news for finance and macro analysis — without worrying about crawling, parsing, or licensing.
If your project values flexibility and raw access, Scrapingdog is a strong choice. If you need clean, analyzable news at speed, Finlight offers a more robust foundation out of the box.