Web Scraping

Scrapy61.0k★

Scrapy is the Python web scraping framework that handles the ugly parts — request scheduling, rate limiting, middleware, pipelines, and export formats — so you can focus on parsing the HTML. It's not a library; it's a full crawling engine. If you're scraping at scale — thousands of pages, multiple sites, structured data extraction — Scrapy is the production choice. Beautiful Soup is simpler for one-off parsing but doesn't manage requests. Playwright/Puppeteer handle JavaScript-rendered pages that Scrapy can't. Selenium is the legacy browser automation option. Commercially, ScrapingBee and Bright Data offer proxy-managed scraping as a service. The middleware system lets you plug in rotating proxies, custom headers, retry logic, and rate limiting. Pipelines export to JSON, CSV, databases, or wherever. Spider contracts make testing crawlers manageable. The catch: Scrapy doesn't render JavaScript. If the site you're scraping is a React SPA, you need Splash or scrapy-playwright to execute JS first. The async Twisted reactor is powerful but unfamiliar to most Python devs. And web scraping itself is legally gray — always check robots.txt and terms of service before deploying.

Crawlee22.5k★

Crawlee is the most production-ready web scraping framework for Node.js — it handles proxy rotation, browser fingerprinting, session management, request queuing, and adaptive concurrency out of the box. Write your crawler once, swap between HTTP, Cheerio, Puppeteer, or Playwright backends based on what the target site needs. If you're building a scraper that needs to survive anti-bot defenses and run reliably at scale, Crawlee saves you weeks of infrastructure work. Scrapy (Python) is the veteran with a bigger ecosystem but no built-in browser support. Puppeteer/Playwright alone give you browser control but none of the orchestration. Firecrawl is the API-based alternative for AI-ready content extraction. The catch: Crawlee is TypeScript-first — if your team is Python-native, Scrapy is still more natural. It's built by Apify, so the commercial upsell to Apify Cloud is ever-present. The learning curve for the full framework (crawlers, request handlers, storage) is steeper than just writing a Puppeteer script. And web scraping at scale always means playing cat-and-mouse with anti-bot systems, regardless of your tool.