photonvsfirecrawl

GPL-3.0 61 3 12,807

1.4 thousand (month) Aug 24 2018 1.1.9(2018-10-21 03:39:17 ago)

- - - None

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

Photon is a Python library for web scraping. It is designed to be lightweight and fast, and can be used to extract data from websites and web pages. Photon can extract the following data while crawling:

URLs (in-scope & out-of-scope)
URLs with parameters (example.com/gallery.php?id=2)
Intel (emails, social media accounts, amazon buckets etc.)
Files (pdf, png, xml etc.)
Secret keys (auth/API keys & hashes)
JavaScript files & Endpoints present in them
Strings matching custom regex pattern
Subdomains & DNS related data

The extracted information is saved in an organized manner or can be exported as json.

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

```python from photon import Photon #Create a new Photon instance ph = Photon() #Extract data from a specific element of the website url = "https://www.example.com" selector = "div.main" data = ph.get_data(url, selector) #Print the extracted data print(data) #Extract data from multiple websites asynchronously urls = ["https://www.example1.com", "https://www.example2.com"] data = ph.get_data_async(urls) ```

```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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