Crawlee

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.