What is Scrapy?
Scrapy is one of the fastest and most powerful web crawling frameworks. Written in Twisted - an event-driven framework that gives it asynchronous capabilities - Scrapy is one of the most popular choices for web scraping in Python. It allows you to extract data from multiple pages in parallel and export it.
Why use Scrapy? What are the advantages and disadvantages?
Unlike many alternatives, Scrapy is designed specifically for data extraction. It has built-in support for handling requests, processing responses, and exporting data. Scrapy makes it easy for you to post-process any data you find while crawling and scraping the web. It can handle many requests at the same time, which makes scraping runs faster. It also provides the building blocks you need to build spiders for web crawling that require a minimum amount of maintenance.
That all sounds great. So, why would anyone look for Scrapy alternatives? One reason is that Scrapy is a Python library, so if youre a JavaScript developer, you might want to know what Node.js alternatives are out there. But even for Pythonistas, Scrapy is as notorious for its disadvantages as it is famous for its strengths.
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The first disadvantage is its complexity. Scrapy is known for its steep learning curve. If youre new to web scraping, youd probably want to go for a beginner-friendly alternative, such as Beautiful Soup.
The other disadvantage is that Scrapy cannot scrape dynamically loaded content on its own. To extract pages loaded dynamically with AJAX or data rendered using JavaScript, youll need to render the pages like a real user. HTML scrapers aren't capable of that, but drivers that can control headless browsers are. So, in such cases, youll need to pair Scrapy with a driver such as Playwright or Selenium.
5 alternatives to Scrapy for web scraping
We looked at five alternatives to Scrapy for both Python and JavaScript. The table below is a basic comparison between them and Scrapy for ease of use, language support, browser automation, scalability, support for dynamic content, and more.
| Tool | Tool type | Supported languages | Browser automation | Default browser fingerprint generation | Ease of use | Scalability | Support for dynamic content | Integrations | Documentation | Community and Support |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scrapy | Web crawling and scraping framework (but doesn't have browser automation built in) | Python | ❌ | Limited, but it allows for manual fingerprinting configuration | For the tech-savvy. Scrapy has a steep learning curve | ✅ Excellent | Possible via plugins | ✅ Has built in exports to databases | Extensive and detailed, but lacks substantial real-life spider examples | Large following, online community, and forums |
| Beautiful Soup | XML and HTML parser. Parsing is only one aspect of web scraping. So Beautiful Soup isn’t a full-featured web scraping library | Python | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ Beginner friendly | Not so good | ❌ | ❌ | Somewhat limited and has an outdated feel to it. However, there is plenty of available info online due to the library's popularity and huge community | Large following |
| Selenium | Automation testing library | JavaScript, Typescript, Python, .NET, C#, Java, Ruby | ✅ | ❌ | Moderate | Not so good | ✅ | ❌ | Extensive but has a slightly outdated feel to it | Large following |
| Playwright | Automation testing library | JavaScript, Typescript, Python, .NET, C#, Java | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ Easy | Not so good | ✅ | ❌ | Extensive and detailed | Good developer support and a growing community. |
| Cheerio | XML and HTML parser. Parsing is only one aspect of web scraping. So Cheerio isn’t a full-featured web scraping library | JavaScript, TypeScript | ❌ | ❌ | Easy if you already know jQuery | Not so good | ❌ | ❌ | Limited | Substantial (It's a large following, considering the Node.js scraping community is considerably smaller than its Python counterpart) |
| Crawlee | Full-featured web scraping and browser automation library | JavaScript, TypeScript | ✅ | ✅ Browser fingerprints are generated by default and can be customized with PuppeteerCrawler or PlaywrightCrawler | Moderate | ✅ Excellent | ✅ | ❌ | Extensive, including multiple examples of how the library can be applied in real scraping situations | Good developer support and a growing community |
Python alternatives to Scrapy
Beautiful Soup
Beautiful Soup is a popular Python library for parsing HTML and easily navigating or modifying a DOM tree. However, parsing is only one aspect of web scraping, so it isnt a full-featured web scraping library. Beautiful Soup is renowned for being user-friendly and much easier to learn than Scrapy. Extracting HTML and XML elements from a web page requires only a few lines of code, making it ideal for tackling simple scraping tasks with speed. However, its lack of asynchronous support means that it isnt great for scalability and large web scraping projects.
Is Scrapy better than Beautiful Soup?
For beginners and small projects, Beautiful Soup is a better option. For scalability, Scrapy beats Beautiful Soup.
➡️ Beautiful Soup tutorial
Learn how to scrape websites using Python and its Beautiful Soup library.
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Selenium
Selenium is an open-source suite of tools to automate web browsers across multiple platforms. It has a huge community largely due to its age and wide-ranging language support. Though it was primarily developed for web testing, its commonly used for scraping due to its ability to control headless browsers, render JavaScript on a page, and scrape dynamic websites.
Nonetheless, given it wasnt designed for web scraping, it isnt the most user-friendly option, nor is it ideal for large-scale data extraction, as scraping large amounts of data is slow and inefficient in comparison with other alternatives.
Is Scrapy better than Selenium?
For scalability, Scrapy wins again. But Selenium wins for its cross-language support and efficiency in scraping dynamic content (though scraping dynamic content is possible with Scrapy via plugins).
Playwright
Since it was launched in 2020, Playwright has been rapidly growing in popularity among Pythonistas and JS fans alike due to its cross-browser and multi-language support, ease of use, and other cool modern features. Although its primarily for controlling browsers, its versatility and auto-awaiting function make it a very popular choice for data extraction. If its Python you want, check out the Playwright for Python documentation.
Is Scrapy better than Playwright?
Although Playwright is a JavaScript and Node.js library, its consistent support of Python makes it worth comparing to Scrapy. As with Selenium, Playwright outperforms Scrapy on the dynamic content front. Yet Scrapy remains the better option for scalability.
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JavaScript alternatives to Scrapy
Cheerio
You could say that Cheerio is the JavaScript/TypeScript counterpart to Beautiful Soup, inasmuch as it's an XML and HTML parser rather than a full-fledged web scraping library. Cheerio is easy to learn if you already know jQuery. It offers great flexibility and works with a simple and consistent DOM model that makes it highly efficient at parsing and rendering.
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Using Axios and Cheerio in Node.js. With code examples.
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Crawlee
Crawlee is the only Scrapy alternative on our list that is a full-fledged web scraping and browser automation library. The browser automation part is significant, as this makes it an even more complete web scraping library than Scrapy.
When it comes to web data extraction, Crawlee has a couple of significant advantages over other alternatives. It's more efficient than Scrapy in extracting dynamic content and offers the capability of browser fingerprint generation, which is imperative to avoid blocking. Blocking and dynamic content are the two biggest challenges for modern web scraping.
Crawlee makes HTTP requests that mimic browser headers and TLS fingerprints. It lets you easily switch your crawlers from HTTP to headless browsers, automatically manages concurrency based on available system resources, smartly rotates proxies, and more.
Learn more about this open-source web scraping library for JavaScript and Typescript in the Crawlee documentation, or watch the short video introduction below.
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