Scrapy Vs. Crawlee

• crawlee

  32 12,621 9.8 TypeScript

  Crawlee—A web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js to build reliable crawlers. In JavaScript and TypeScript. Extract data for AI, LLMs, RAG, or GPTs. Download HTML, PDF, JPG, PNG, and other files from websites. Works with Puppeteer, Playwright, Cheerio, JSDOM, and raw HTTP. Both headful and headless mode. With proxy rotation.

  

Crawlee is one of the few web scraping and automation libraries that supports JavaScript and TypeScript. Crawlee supports CLI just like Scrapy, but it also provides pre-built templates in TypeScript and JavaScript with support for Playwright and Puppeteer. These templates help beginners to quickly understand the file structure and how it works.

• Scrapy

  182 51,270 9.6 Python

  Scrapy, a fast high-level web crawling & scraping framework for Python.

  

Scrapy is an open-source Python-based web scraping framework that extracts data from websites. With Scrapy, you create spiders, which are autonomous scripts to download and process web content. The limitation of Scrapy is that it does not work very well with JavaScript rendered websites, as it was designed for static HTML pages. We will do a comparison later in the article about this.

• SurveyJS

  surveyjs.io featured

  Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

  

• scrapy-playwright

  12 867 7.2 Python

  🎭 Playwright integration for Scrapy

  

Scrapy does not support headless browsers natively, but it supports them with its plugin system, similarly it does not support scraping JavaScript rendered websites, but the plugin system makes this possible. One of the best examples is its Playwright plugin.

• apify-sdk-js

  3 108 9.2 TypeScript

  Apify SDK monorepo

  

Crawlee is also an open-source library that originated as Apify SDK. Crawlee has the advantage of being the latest library in the market, so it already has many features that Scrapy lacks, like autoscaling, headless browsing, working with JavaScript rendered websites without any plugins, and many more, which we are going to explain later on.

• puppeteer

  363 87,118 9.9 TypeScript

  Node.js API for Chrome

  

In Crawlee, you can scrape JavaScript rendered websites using the built-in headless Puppeteer and Playwright browsers. It is important to note that, by default, Crawlee scrapes in headless mode. If you don't want headless, then just set headless: false.

• Playwright

  386 62,521 9.9 TypeScript

  Playwright is a framework for Web Testing and Automation. It allows testing Chromium, Firefox and WebKit with a single API.

  

In Crawlee, you can scrape JavaScript rendered websites using the built-in headless Puppeteer and Playwright browsers. It is important to note that, by default, Crawlee scrapes in headless mode. If you don't want headless, then just set headless: false.

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