Skip to content

Frameworks

There are several popular web scraping frameworks of varying complexity and whether to use a framework or not depends on a few key factors:

Pros 👍

  • Frameworks come with many batteries-included like automatically configuring request headers, rate limiting, proxy switching etc.
  • Community plugins and documentation helps to solve popular problems.
  • Easy to scale up.

Cons 👎

  • Learning curve.
  • Frameworks are often very opaque making it harder to debug and understand the scraping process.
  • Hard to patch weak points for avoiding blocking.

In summary, frameworks are best for medium-sized average web scrapers. Here's a list of popular web scraping frameworks:

language framework highlights
Python scrapy most popular web scraping framework, big community, feature rich
autoscraper automatic parsing via fuzzy matching
Go colly simple, aimed at crawling
gospider similar to colly
dataflowkit integrated browser automation
ferret custom DSL, integrated browser automation (Chrome)
geziyor scrapy-like
PHP panther integrated browser automation
php-spider extendible
Ruby spidr simple, aimed at crawling
wombat custom DSL
NodeJS ayakashi custom DSL, extendible