Puppeteer vs Playwright vs Cheerio vs XCrawl: Which Web Scraping Tool to Use in 2026

Four tools, four different philosophies.

Comparison

Feature	Cheerio	Puppeteer	Playwright	XCrawl
Setup	5 min	15 min	15 min	2 min
JS rendering	❌	✅	✅	✅
Anti-bot	❌	❌ Basic	❌ Basic	✅ Built-in
CAPTCHA	❌	❌	❌	✅ Auto
Proxies	❌ DIY	❌ DIY	❌ DIY	✅ Auto
Price	Free	Free	Free	From $49/mo

When to Use What

Cheerio: Static HTML, simple parsing, you have proxy infra.

Puppeteer: Need CDP access, screenshots, already in Node.js.

Playwright: Cross-browser support, mobile emulation, E2E tests.

XCrawl: Production scraping, anti-bot bypass, want API simplicity.

Real-World Decision

One page once → Cheerio
Screenshots → Puppeteer
Testing → Playwright
1000 pages/day → XCrawl

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XCrawl API — web scraping with built-in proxies, CAPTCHA solving, and JS rendering.