Originally published on proxymint.
Python, Node, Go and Java compared for scraping by parsing tools, concurrency, headless browsers and proxy support, with a verified proxy snippet for each.
TL;DR
- Pick the language by the bottleneck. Parsing tools, concurrency model, headless browser support and proxy handling decide more than raw speed on I/O-bound scraping.
- Python has the widest scraping libraries. requests, httpx, aiohttp, BeautifulSoup, lxml, Scrapy and an official Playwright API make it the fastest route to a first working scraper.
- Node is the browser-native choice. Playwright and Puppeteer run natively, and undici's ProxyAgent handles HTTP proxies, with SOCKS5 support still marked experimental.
- Go has the cleanest proxy support. The standard library takes http, https, socks5 and socks5h proxy URLs and resolves hostnames at the proxy for SOCKS5.
- Java's built-in HttpClient has two proxy traps. Basic proxy authentication is disabled for HTTPS tunnels by default, and a SOCKS proxy is ignored so requests leave from the machine's own address.
Key takeaways
- Use Python when time to a working scraper matters most. Pass proxies per request in requests, and use the proxy argument, not proxies, in httpx 0.28 and later.
- Use Node when most targets need a real browser. Keep HTTP and browser work in one runtime and use undici's ProxyAgent for per-request proxy control.
- Use Go when requests per second per machine is the limit. Goroutines keep many requests in flight and SOCKS5 works without extra packages.
- On Java, start the JVM with jdk.http.auth.tunneling.disabledSchemes cleared. Otherwise HTTPS through an authenticated proxy returns 407, and never point the built-in HttpClient at a SOCKS proxy.
- Check the exit IP through the configured client before every job. One request to an IP-echo endpoint catches clients that silently bypass the proxy.
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