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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.
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?
You better go with puppeteer. It is basically chrome automation tool, written in nodejs. So what you get is PDF, generated by chrome itself. I guess there is hardly better PDF generation tool for the web. Phantomjs is already more or less outdated as technology. It uses some old webkit port that's quite behind in terms of standards and features. It can be replaced with puppeteer for every single task.
I suggest puppeteer to go for. It is simple and easy to set up. Only limitaiton is it can be used only for chrome browser and currently they are looking into expanding into FF. The next thing is Playwright which is just a scale up of Puppeteer. It supports cross browsers.
Pros of Puppeteer
- Very well documented10
- Scriptable web browser10
- Promise based6
Pros of Scrapy
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Cons of Puppeteer
- Chrome only10
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