Houyi Collector is positioned as a free website web crawler tool for individuals, teams, and enterprises, in contrast to traditional scraping/crawler software that requires writing rules. It focuses on no programming and no configuration: enter a URL and it can intelligently identify list data, table data, pagination buttons, links, images, prices, and more. It supports visual workflows, scheduled collection, automatic export, Webhook, RESTful API, and export to TXT, Excel, CSV, and HTML, or publishing to databases.

The product is mainly used as a one-click install desktop client rather than a typical self-hosted service. It supports Windows 7/8/10, macOS 10.9+, and Linux distributions including Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, and Fedora; the source material does not provide CPU or memory requirements. Users in China may note its WeChat customer service, Zhejiang ICP filing, and that the video is technically supported by Polyv; database publishing supports MySQL, MongoDB, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL.