node-crawlervscrawlee
node-crawler is a popular web scraping library for Node.js that allows you to easily navigate and extract data from websites. It has a simple API and supports concurrency, making it efficient for scraping large numbers of pages.
Features:
- Server-side DOM & automatic jQuery insertion with Cheerio (default) or JSDOM,
- Configurable pool size and retries,
- Control rate limit,
- Priority queue of requests,
- forceUTF8 mode to let crawler deal for you with charset detection and conversion,
- Compatible with 4.x or newer version.
- Http2 support
- Proxy support
Crawlee is a modern web scraping and browser automation framework for JavaScript and TypeScript, built by Apify. It is the successor to the Apify SDK and provides a unified interface for building reliable web scrapers and crawlers that can scale from simple scripts to large-scale data extraction projects.
Crawlee supports multiple crawling strategies through different crawler classes:
- CheerioCrawler For fast, lightweight HTML scraping using Cheerio (no browser needed). Best for static pages.
- PlaywrightCrawler Uses Playwright for full browser automation. Handles JavaScript-rendered pages, SPAs, and complex interactions.
- PuppeteerCrawler Similar to PlaywrightCrawler but uses Puppeteer as the browser automation backend.
- HttpCrawler Minimal crawler for raw HTTP requests without HTML parsing.
Key features include:
- Automatic request queue management with configurable concurrency and rate limiting
- Built-in proxy rotation with session management
- Persistent request queue and dataset storage (local or cloud via Apify)
- Automatic retry and error handling with configurable strategies
- TypeScript-first design with full type safety
- Middleware-like request/response hooks (preNavigationHooks, postNavigationHooks)
- Output pipelines for storing extracted data
- Easy deployment to Apify cloud platform
Crawlee is considered the most feature-complete web scraping framework in the JavaScript/TypeScript ecosystem, comparable to Python's Scrapy but with native browser automation support.
Highlights
populartypescriptextendiblemiddlewaresoutput-pipelineslarge-scaleproxy
Example Use
```javascript
const Crawler = require('crawler');
const c = new Crawler({
maxConnections: 10,
// This will be called for each crawled page
callback: (error, res, done) => {
if (error) {
console.log(error);
} else {
const $ = res.$;
// $ is Cheerio by default
//a lean implementation of core jQuery designed specifically for the server
console.log($('title').text());
}
done();
}
});
// Queue just one URL, with default callback
c.queue('http://www.amazon.com');
// Queue a list of URLs
c.queue(['http://www.google.com/','http://www.yahoo.com']);
// Queue URLs with custom callbacks & parameters
c.queue([{
uri: 'http://parishackers.org/',
jQuery: false,
// The global callback won't be called
callback: (error, res, done) => {
if (error) {
console.log(error);
} else {
console.log('Grabbed', res.body.length, 'bytes');
}
done();
}
}]);
// Queue some HTML code directly without grabbing (mostly for tests)
c.queue([{
html: '
This is a test
' }]); ```
```javascript
import { PlaywrightCrawler, Dataset } from 'crawlee';
// Create a crawler with Playwright for JS rendering
const crawler = new PlaywrightCrawler({
// Limit concurrency to avoid overwhelming the target
maxConcurrency: 5,
// This function is called for each URL
async requestHandler({ request, page, enqueueLinks }) {
const title = await page.title();
// Extract data from the page
const products = await page.$$eval('.product', (els) =>
els.map((el) => ({
name: el.querySelector('.name')?.textContent,
price: el.querySelector('.price')?.textContent,
}))
);
// Store extracted data
await Dataset.pushData({
url: request.url,
title,
products,
});
// Follow links to crawl more pages
await enqueueLinks({
globs: ['https://example.com/products/**'],
});
},
});
// Start crawling
await crawler.run(['https://example.com/products']);
```
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