Skip to content

crawleevsscrapyd

Apache-2.0 175 26 22,720
341.9 thousand (month) Apr 22 2022 3.16.0(2026-04-09 07:36:53 ago)
3,087 8 6 BSD-3-Clause
Sep 04 2013 44.4 thousand (month) 1.6.0(2025-07-22 06:00:53 ago)

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.

Scrapyd is a service for running Scrapy spiders. It allows you to schedule spiders to run at regular intervals and also allows you to run spiders on remote machines. It is built in Python, and it is meant to be used in a server-client architecture, where the scrapyd server runs on a remote machine, and clients can schedule and control spider runs on the server using an HTTP API. With Scrapyd, you can schedule spider runs on a regular basis, schedule spider runs on demand, and view the status of running spiders.

You can also see the logs of completed spiders, and manage spider settings and configurations. Scrapyd also provides an API that allows you to schedule spider runs, cancel spider runs, and view the status of running spiders. You can install the package via pip by running pip install scrapyd and then you can run the package by running scrapyd command in your command prompt. By default, it will start a web server on port 6800, but you can specify a different port using the `--port`` option.

Scrapyd is a good solution if you need to run Scrapy spiders on a remote machine, or if you need to schedule spider runs on a regular basis. It's also useful if you have multiple spiders, and you need a way to manage and monitor them all in one place.

for more web interface see scrapydweb

Highlights


populartypescriptextendiblemiddlewaresoutput-pipelineslarge-scaleproxy

Example Use


```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']); ```
```shell $ scrapyd $ curl http://localhost:6800/schedule.json -d project=myproject -d spider=spider2 ```

Alternatives / Similar


Was this page helpful?