node-crawlervsfirecrawl

MIT 30 6 6,790

15.3 thousand (month) Sep 10 2012 2.0.2(2025-05-28 09:36:01 ago)

- - - None

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

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

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.

Highlights

ai-poweredpopularasync

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

' }]); ```

```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") ```

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