Alex Spinov

Posted on Mar 25

I Curated 130+ Web Scraping Tools So You Don't Have To (2026 Edition)

#python #webdev #opensource #tutorial

The Problem

Every time I start a new scraping project, I waste an hour searching for the right tool. There are hundreds of libraries, frameworks, and services — and half of them are abandoned.

So I built a curated list: 130+ web scraping tools, organized by language, purpose, and actively maintained as of 2026.

awesome-web-scraping-2026 on GitHub (9 stars, growing)

Here's a preview of the best tools in each category.

Python (The King of Scraping)

Tool	Best For	Stars
Scrapy	Large-scale crawling	53K+
BeautifulSoup	Quick HTML parsing	28K+
Playwright	JavaScript-heavy sites	68K+
httpx	Async HTTP requests	13K+
Selectolax	Fast HTML parsing (Cython)	1K+
curl_cffi	TLS fingerprint matching	3K+

My Go-To Stack for 90% of Projects

import httpx
from selectolax.parser import HTMLParser

resp = httpx.get("https://example.com")
tree = HTMLParser(resp.text)

for item in tree.css("div.product"):
    title = item.css_first("h2").text()
    price = item.css_first(".price").text()
    print(f"{title}: {price}")

Why this stack: httpx is faster than requests (async support), selectolax is 10x faster than BeautifulSoup for parsing. For simple pages, you don't need Scrapy's overhead.

JavaScript / Node.js

Tool	Best For
Playwright	Full browser automation
Puppeteer	Chrome-specific automation
Cheerio	Server-side HTML parsing
Crawlee	Production crawling framework
got-scraping	HTTP with anti-bot headers

Anti-Detection & Proxies

Tool	What It Does
curl_cffi	Impersonates real browser TLS fingerprints
undetected-chromedriver	Bypasses Cloudflare for Selenium
BrightData	Premium proxy network
ScraperAPI	Handles proxies + captchas
Oxylabs	Residential proxy network

Free API Alternatives (No Scraping Needed)

Before you scrape, check if there's a free API. I maintain a list of 250+ free APIs:

Data	Free API	Scraping?
Academic papers	OpenAlex	Not needed
Stock prices	Yahoo Finance API	Not needed
Weather	Open-Meteo	Not needed
News	GNews API	Not needed
Jobs	Arbeitnow API	Not needed

Data Processing

Tool	Purpose
pandas	Tabular data analysis
jq	JSON processing (CLI)
SQLite	Local data storage
DuckDB	Analytics on scraped data

The Full List

The complete collection has 130+ tools across 15 categories:

Python libraries (25+)
JavaScript tools (15+)
Go & Rust scrapers (10+)
Browser automation (10+)
Anti-detection tools (8+)
Proxy services (10+)
Data extraction (12+)
Cloud scraping platforms (8+)
CLI tools (10+)
And more...

Browse the full list on GitHub →

What Am I Missing?

If you know a great scraping tool that's not in the list — drop it in the comments or open a PR. I update the list weekly.

What's your go-to scraping stack? I'm curious what combinations people are using in 2026.

I write about data extraction, APIs, and automation. Follow for weekly practical tutorials.

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