scrapyvsscrapling
Scrapy is an open-source Python library for web scraping. It allows developers to extract structured data from websites using a simple and consistent interface.
Scrapy provides:
- A built-in way to follow links and extract data from multiple pages (crawling)
- Handling common web scraping tasks such as logging in, handling cookies, and handling redirects.
Scrapy is built on top of the Twisted networking engine, which provides a non-blocking way to handle multiple requests at the same time, allowing Scrapy to efficiently scrape large websites.
It also comes with a built-in mechanism for handling common web scraping problems, such as:
- handling HTTP errors
- handling broken links
Scrapy also provide these features:
- Support for storing scraped data in various formats, such as CSV, JSON, and XML.
- Built-in support for selecting and extracting data using XPath or CSS selectors (through
parsel). - Built-in support for handling common web scraping problems (like deduplication and url filtering).
- Ability to easily extend its functionality using middlewares.
- Ability to easily extend output processing using pipelines.
Scrapling is an adaptive web scraping framework for Python that introduces "self-healing" selectors — selectors that can track and find elements even when the website's DOM structure changes. This solves one of the biggest maintenance headaches in web scraping: broken selectors after website updates.
Key features include:
- Self-healing selectors Scrapling uses smart element matching that can identify target elements even after the page structure changes. It builds a fingerprint of the element based on multiple attributes (text, position, siblings, attributes) and uses fuzzy matching to relocate it.
- Multiple parsing backends Supports different parsing engines including lxml (fast) and a custom engine, allowing you to choose the right balance of speed and features.
- Scrapy-like Spider API Provides a familiar Spider class pattern for organizing crawling logic, similar to Scrapy but with the added benefit of adaptive selectors.
- CSS and XPath selectors Full support for CSS selectors and XPath, plus the adaptive matching system on top.
- Type hints and modern Python Built with full type annotations and 92% test coverage for reliability.
- Async support Supports asynchronous crawling for efficient concurrent scraping.
Scrapling gained massive traction in 2025 as one of the most starred new Python scraping libraries. It is particularly useful for scraping targets that frequently update their HTML structure, where traditional selector-based scrapers would break.