Crawlee

Crawlee is a Node.js web scraping and browser automation library. Not a point-and-click scraper. A full framework for building crawlers that handle the hard stuff: request queuing, proxy rotation, browser fingerprinting, error recovery, and storage.

Supports three modes: plain HTTP requests (fast, for simple pages), Cheerio (HTML parsing without a browser), and full browser automation via Playwright or Puppeteer (for JavaScript-heavy sites). You pick the right tool for each job. Built by Apify, who run a web scraping platform. They open-sourced their crawler framework and it's legitimately good.

Completely free and Apache-2.0 licensed. No feature gates. You can deploy crawlers anywhere: your server, AWS, or Apify's cloud platform (which is paid but optional).

The catch: Crawlee is Node.js only. Python developers should look at Scrapy. Also, web scraping is inherently fragile; sites change, CAPTCHAs evolve, rate limits tighten. Crawlee gives you the tools to handle this but you still need to maintain your scrapers. Apify Cloud is the easy button for deployment ($49/mo+) but self-hosting works fine.