firecrawlvscolly

None - - -

Apr 01 2024 0.0.0(2025-03-15 00:00:00 ago)

25,231 7 187 Apache-2.0

May 14 2018 v2.2.0(2025-03-27 10:47:28 ago)

Firecrawl is an AI-powered web scraping API that converts web pages into clean Markdown or structured data, optimized for use with large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines. It handles JavaScript rendering, anti-bot bypass, and content extraction automatically.

Firecrawl offers multiple modes:

Scrape Convert a single URL into clean Markdown, HTML, or structured data. Handles JavaScript rendering and anti-bot protections automatically.
Crawl Crawl an entire website starting from a URL, with configurable depth, URL patterns, and page limits. Returns all pages as clean Markdown.
Map Quickly discover all URLs on a website without fully scraping each page. Useful for sitemap generation and crawl planning.
Extract Use LLMs to extract specific structured data from pages based on a schema definition.

Key features:

Clean Markdown output ideal for LLM context windows
Automatic JavaScript rendering with headless browsers
Built-in anti-bot bypass for protected websites
Structured extraction with JSON schemas
Batch crawling with webhook notifications
Python and JavaScript SDKs

Firecrawl is a commercial API service (requires API key, has a free tier) backed by Y Combinator. It has become one of the most popular tools for feeding web content into AI applications and is widely used in the LLM/RAG ecosystem.

Note: while the primary service is an API, the core is open source and can be self-hosted.

Colly is a popular web scraping library for the Go programming language. It's designed to be fast and easy to use, and it provides a simple and flexible API for traversing and extracting information from websites.

Colly supports:

Concurrent scraping with a simple API
Automatic handling of cookies and sessions
Automatic handling of redirects
Support for parsing HTML and XML
Support for parsing JSON and binary data
Support for custom storage (e.g. scraping results to a database)
Simple JavaScript rendering with Colly's built-in rendering engine.

Colly also provides several optional features, such as support for user-agents, delay between requests, rate-limiting and proxy usage.

Colly's API is quite simple, and it is easy to get started with basic web scraping tasks. It's a good choice for scraping moderate to heavy sites, and it can be useful for a wide range of use cases, such as data mining, content extraction, and more.

Additionally, you can use it together with Goquery, a library that allow you to make jquery like queries on HTML documents and it is often used together with Colly to ease the way of parsing the HTML.

Highlights

ai-poweredpopularasync

popularcss-selectorsxpath-selectorscommunity-toolsoutput-pipelinesmiddlewaresasyncproductionlarge-scale

Example Use

```python from firecrawl import FirecrawlApp app = FirecrawlApp(api_key="YOUR_API_KEY") # Scrape a single page - get clean markdown result = app.scrape_url("https://example.com/blog/article") print(result["markdown"]) # clean markdown content # Extract structured data with a schema result = app.scrape_url( "https://example.com/product/123", params={ "formats": ["extract"], "extract": { "schema": { "type": "object", "properties": { "name": {"type": "string"}, "price": {"type": "number"}, "description": {"type": "string"}, }, } }, }, ) print(result["extract"]) # {"name": "...", "price": 29.99, ...} # Crawl an entire website crawl_result = app.crawl_url( "https://example.com", params={"limit": 100, "scrapeOptions": {"formats": ["markdown"]}}, ) for page in crawl_result["data"]: print(page["metadata"]["title"], page["markdown"][:100]) # Map all URLs on a site map_result = app.map_url("https://example.com") print(f"Found {len(map_result['links'])} URLs") ```

```go package main import ( "fmt" "github.com/gocolly/colly/v2" ) func main() { // Instantiate default collector c := colly.NewCollector( // Visit only domains: hackerspaces.org, wiki.hackerspaces.org colly.AllowedDomains("hackerspaces.org", "wiki.hackerspaces.org"), ) // On every a element which has href attribute call callback c.OnHTML("a[href]", func(e *colly.HTMLElement) { link := e.Attr("href") // Print link fmt.Printf("Link found: %q -> %s\n", e.Text, link) // Visit link found on page // Only those links are visited which are in AllowedDomains c.Visit(e.Request.AbsoluteURL(link)) }) // Before making a request print "Visiting ..." c.OnRequest(func(r *colly.Request) { fmt.Println("Visiting", r.URL.String()) }) // Start scraping on https://hackerspaces.org c.Visit("https://hackerspaces.org/") } ```

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