Puppeteer vs Scrapy

Overview

Scrapy

Stacks244

Followers243

Votes0

GitHub Stars58.9K

Forks11.1K

Puppeteer

Stacks1.0K

Followers582

Votes26

Puppeteer vs Scrapy: What are the differences?

Introduction Puppeteer and Scrapy are both popular tools used for web scraping and automation tasks. While they share some similarities, there are several key differences between the two that are important to consider when choosing the right tool for a specific project.

Browser Automation vs. HTTP Library: One of the fundamental differences between Puppeteer and Scrapy is the approaches they take for web scraping. Puppeteer is a browser automation tool that uses a headless version of Chromium to navigate and interact with websites, while Scrapy is an HTTP library that sends HTTP requests directly to the web server and parses the HTML responses.
JavaScript vs. Python: Puppeteer is written in JavaScript and offers a JavaScript interface, making it a suitable choice for developers who are already familiar with JavaScript and its ecosystem. On the other hand, Scrapy is written in Python and provides a Pythonic API, making it a preferred choice for Python developers.
Rich Web Scraping capabilities vs. Focused Web Scraping: Puppeteer offers rich web scraping capabilities, allowing users to handle various complex scenarios such as rendering JavaScript-heavy pages, interacting with dynamic content, and taking screenshots. Scrapy, while also capable of web scraping, is more focused on providing a robust framework for building large-scale web crawlers and scrapers.
Page Navigation and Interaction vs. URL-based Scraping: With Puppeteer, users can simulate user interactions with a website, such as clicking buttons, filling forms, and navigating through multiple pages. In Scrapy, the focus is more on scraping data from multiple URLs and following links within the webpages.
Sophisticated Crawling Support vs. Lightweight Scraping: Scrapy provides built-in support for sophisticated crawling techniques like crawling websites with multiple levels of depth, handling duplicate URLs, and respecting robots.txt rules. Puppeteer, being more focused on page manipulation and rendering, does not have built-in features for crawling and requires additional implementation for similar functionalities.
Graphical User Interface vs. Command Line Interface: Puppeteer provides a graphical user interface through the headless Chromium browser, allowing users to visually see and interact with the webpage during development and debugging. Scrapy, being a command-line tool, operates solely through the terminal, making it more suitable for automation and batch processing tasks.

In Summary, Puppeteer and Scrapy differ in their approach to web scraping and automation. Puppeteer offers browser automation, JavaScript-based capabilities, and rich web scraping features, while Scrapy is focused on HTTP-based scraping, Python programming, large-scale crawling, and batch processing. Choosing between the two depends on the specific project requirements, the programming language preference, and the complexity of the scraping task at hand.

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Advice on Scrapy, Puppeteer

Ankur

Software Engineer

Dec 4, 2019

Needs advice

I am using Node 12 for server scripting and have a function to generate PDF and send it to a browser. Currently, we are using PhantomJS to generate a PDF. Some web post shows that we can achieve PDF generation using Puppeteer. I was a bit confused. Should we move to puppeteerJS? Which one is better with NodeJS for generating PDF?

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Detailed Comparison

Scrapy	Puppeteer
It is the most popular web scraping framework in Python. An open source and collaborative framework for extracting the data you need from websites. In a fast, simple, yet extensible way.	Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome over the DevTools Protocol. It can also be configured to use full (non-headless) Chrome.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 58.9K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 11.1K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 244	Stacks 1.0K
Followers 243	Followers 582
Votes 0	Votes 26
Pros & Cons
No community feedback yet	Pros 10 Scriptable web browser 10 Very well documented 6 Promise based Cons 10 Chrome only
Integrations
No integrations available	Node.js

What are some alternatives to Scrapy, Puppeteer?

Playwright

It is a Node library to automate the Chromium, WebKit and Firefox browsers with a single API. It enables cross-browser web automation that is ever-green, capable, reliable and fast.

import.io

import.io is a free web-based platform that puts the power of the machine readable web in your hands. Using our tools you can create an API or crawl an entire website in a fraction of the time of traditional methods, no coding required.

ParseHub

Web Scraping and Data Extraction ParseHub is a free and powerful web scraping tool. With our advanced web scraper, extracting data is as easy as clicking on the data you need. ParseHub lets you turn any website into a spreadsheet or API w

PhantomJS

PhantomJS is a headless WebKit scriptable with JavaScript. It is used by hundreds of developers and dozens of organizations for web-related development workflow.

ScrapingAnt

Extract data from websites and turn them to API. We will handle all the rotating proxies and Chrome rendering for you. Many specialists have to handle Javascript rendering, headless browser update and maintenance, proxies diversity and rotation. It is a simple API that does all the above for you.

Octoparse

It is a free client-side Windows web scraping software that turns unstructured or semi-structured data from websites into structured data sets, no coding necessary. Extracted data can be exported as API, CSV, Excel or exported into a database.

Kimono

You don't need to write any code or install any software to extract data with Kimono. The easiest way to use Kimono is to add our bookmarklet to your browser's bookmark bar. Then go to the website you want to get data from and click the bookmarklet. Select the data you want and Kimono does the rest. We take care of hosting the APIs that you build with Kimono and running them on the schedule you specify. Use the API output in JSON or as CSV files that you can easily paste into a spreadsheet.

BeautifulSoup

It works with your favorite parser to provide idiomatic ways of navigating, searching, and modifying the parse tree. It commonly saves programmers hours or days of work.

Apify

Apify is a platform that enables developers to create, customize and run cloud-based programs called actors that can, among other things, be used to extract data from any website using a few lines of JavaScript.

HeadlessTesting

Headless Browser Cloud for Developers. Connect your Puppeteer and Playwright scripts to our Cloud. Automated Browser Testing with Puppeteer and Playwright in the Cloud.

Related Comparisons

Puppeteer vs Scrapy: What are the differences?

Browser Automation vs. HTTP Library: One of the fundamental differences between Puppeteer and Scrapy is the approaches they take for web scraping. Puppeteer is a browser automation tool that uses a headless version of Chromium to navigate and interact with websites, while Scrapy is an HTTP library that sends HTTP requests directly to the web server and parses the HTML responses.
JavaScript vs. Python: Puppeteer is written in JavaScript and offers a JavaScript interface, making it a suitable choice for developers who are already familiar with JavaScript and its ecosystem. On the other hand, Scrapy is written in Python and provides a Pythonic API, making it a preferred choice for Python developers.
Rich Web Scraping capabilities vs. Focused Web Scraping: Puppeteer offers rich web scraping capabilities, allowing users to handle various complex scenarios such as rendering JavaScript-heavy pages, interacting with dynamic content, and taking screenshots. Scrapy, while also capable of web scraping, is more focused on providing a robust framework for building large-scale web crawlers and scrapers.
Page Navigation and Interaction vs. URL-based Scraping: With Puppeteer, users can simulate user interactions with a website, such as clicking buttons, filling forms, and navigating through multiple pages. In Scrapy, the focus is more on scraping data from multiple URLs and following links within the webpages.
Sophisticated Crawling Support vs. Lightweight Scraping: Scrapy provides built-in support for sophisticated crawling techniques like crawling websites with multiple levels of depth, handling duplicate URLs, and respecting robots.txt rules. Puppeteer, being more focused on page manipulation and rendering, does not have built-in features for crawling and requires additional implementation for similar functionalities.
Graphical User Interface vs. Command Line Interface: Puppeteer provides a graphical user interface through the headless Chromium browser, allowing users to visually see and interact with the webpage during development and debugging. Scrapy, being a command-line tool, operates solely through the terminal, making it more suitable for automation and batch processing tasks.

Puppeteer vs Scrapy

Overview