Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Microlink VS Scrapy

Compare Microlink VS Scrapy and see what are their differences

Microlink logo Microlink

Extract structured data from any website

Scrapy logo Scrapy

Scrapy | A Fast and Powerful Scraping and Web Crawling Framework
  • Microlink Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-24
  • Scrapy Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-11

Microlink features and specs

  • Ease of Implementation
    Microlink provides a straightforward API that is easy to integrate into various applications, enabling users to quickly extract web data.
  • Customizability
    The platform allows users to tailor the extraction process to their specific needs, including modifying data extraction settings and using custom rules.
  • Performance
    Microlink's infrastructure is built for handling large-scale requests efficiently, providing fast data retrieval from various sources.
  • Versatile Data Extraction
    It supports a wide array of data extraction use cases, such as scraping metadata, articles, and other web page elements from different websites.
  • Support & Documentation
    The service offers comprehensive documentation and reliable customer support to help users effectively utilize the platform.

Possible disadvantages of Microlink

  • Pricing Structure
    For smaller projects or individual use, the cost might be prohibitive, as Microlink generally targets larger-scale operations that require frequent data extraction.
  • Limited Free Tier
    The free tier of the service has limitations in terms of the number of requests, which may not be sufficient for users with substantial data needs.
  • Potential Overhead
    Depending on the project's complexity, there might be additional overhead in setting up API requests and handling data management post-extraction.
  • Reliance on Web Stability
    Like any web scraping service, its effectiveness can be impacted by changes in the target websites' structures or anti-scraping measures.

Scrapy features and specs

  • Efficiency
    Scrapy is designed to be efficient and robust, capable of handling multiple tasks simultaneously and scraping large websites in a fast and reliable manner.
  • Built-in Tooling
    Scrapy comes with built-in tools for handling common tasks such as following links, extracting data using XPath and CSS, and exporting data in a variety of formats.
  • Customization
    Scrapy offers extensive customization options, allowing users to build complex spiders and modify their behavior through middleware and pipelines.
  • Python Integration
    Being a Python framework, Scrapy integrates seamlessly with the Python ecosystem, enabling the use of libraries like Pandas, NumPy, and others to process and analyze scraped data.
  • Community Support
    Scrapy has a large and active community, providing extensive documentation, tutorials, and third-party extensions to enhance functionality.
  • Asynchronous Processing
    Scrapy’s asynchronous processing model enhances performance by allowing multiple concurrent requests, reducing the time required for crawling sites.

Possible disadvantages of Scrapy

  • Steep Learning Curve
    For beginners, Scrapy's comprehensive feature set and the need for understanding concepts like XPath and CSS selectors can be challenging.
  • Resource Intensive
    Scrapy can be resource-intensive, potentially consuming significant memory and CPU, which can be problematic for scraping very large websites or running multiple spiders simultaneously.
  • Debugging Complexity
    Debugging Scrapy projects can be complex due to its asynchronous nature and the multiple layers of middleware and pipelines that need to be understood.
  • Overhead for Small Projects
    For simple or small-scale scraping tasks, the overhead of setting up and configuring a Scrapy project might be excessive, with simpler alternatives being more suitable.
  • Limited JavaScript Support
    Scrapy's out-of-the-box support for JavaScript-heavy websites is limited, requiring additional tools like Splash or Selenium, which can complicate the setup.
  • Dependency Management
    Managing Scrapy's dependencies and compatibility with other Python packages can sometimes be challenging, leading to potential conflicts and maintenance overhead.

Microlink videos

Update: Microlink Extensions on NATURAL HAIR | HONEST REVIEW!

More videos:

  • Review - FIRST TIME GETTING MICROLINKS (EXTENSIONS) + REVIEW: ARE THEY WORTH THE PRICE!?

Scrapy videos

Python Scrapy Tutorial - 22 - Web Scraping Amazon

More videos:

  • Demo - Scrapy - Overview and Demo (web crawling and scraping)
  • Review - GFuel LemoNADE Taste Test & Review! | Scrapy

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Microlink and Scrapy)
Web Scraping
13 13%
87% 87
Automation
100 100%
0% 0
Data Extraction
0 0%
100% 100
Headless Browsers
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Microlink and Scrapy

Microlink Reviews

We have no reviews of Microlink yet.
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Scrapy Reviews

Top 15 Best TinyTask Alternatives in 2022
The software is simply deployable via the cloud, or you can host the spiders on your server using Scrapy. Only the rules need to be written; Scrapy will take care of the rest to separate the facts. With Scrapy’s portability and ability to run on Windows, Linux, Mac, and BSD platforms, new features can be added without affecting the program’s core.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Scrapy seems to be a lot more popular than Microlink. While we know about 97 links to Scrapy, we've tracked only 5 mentions of Microlink. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Microlink mentions (5)

  • This weird IFRAME thing wasted my 2 days (and counting...)
    It's a very basic idea. Few days back, I got to know about this tool named 'microlink' which is a free Browser-as-API sdk. One of its feature was that you provide it a url and it will give you a screenshot of that particular page. - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
  • Newpipe/yt-dlp stops working
    How do the multiple startups that import YouTube video into their platform work - one's that need the video/audio files? There seems to be a lot of webapps supporting this but I always wondered if they have a goto API for doing this. I myself have used microlink at some points for automated video source extraction. https://microlink.io. - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • Creating a serverless function to scrape web pages metadata
    Metascraper is baked by Microlink, which uses it internally in its browser automation product. - Source: dev.to / almost 4 years ago
  • Show HN: Till – Unblock and scale your web scrapers, with minimal code changes
    These guys bypass cloudflare https://microlink.io it's open source but it's just more convenient to pay and forget about it. - Source: Hacker News / over 3 years ago
  • Free for dev - list of software (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.)
    Microlink.io – It turns any website into data such as metatags normalization, beauty link previews, scraping capabilities or screenshots as a service. 250 reqs/day every day free. - Source: dev.to / almost 4 years ago

Scrapy mentions (97)

  • Current problems and mistakes of web scraping in Python and tricks to solve them!
    One might ask, what about Scrapy? I'll be honest: I don't really keep up with their updates. But I haven't heard about Zyte doing anything to bypass TLS fingerprinting. So out of the box Scrapy will also be blocked, but nothing is stopping you from using curl_cffi in your Scrapy Spider. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Automate Spider Creation in Scrapy with Jinja2 and JSON
    Install scrapy (Offical website) either using pip or conda (Follow for detailed instructions):. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • Analyzing Svenskalag Data using DBT and DuckDB
    Using Scrapy I fetched the data needed (activities and attendance). Scrapy handled authentication using a form request in a very simple way:. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • Scrapy Vs. Crawlee
    Scrapy is an open-source Python-based web scraping framework that extracts data from websites. With Scrapy, you create spiders, which are autonomous scripts to download and process web content. The limitation of Scrapy is that it does not work very well with JavaScript rendered websites, as it was designed for static HTML pages. We will do a comparison later in the article about this. - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago
  • What is SERP? Meaning, Use Cases and Approaches
    While there is no specific library for SERP, there are some web scraping libraries that can do the Google Search Page Ranking. One of them which is quite famous is Scrapy - It is a fast high-level web crawling and web scraping framework, used to crawl websites and extract structured data from their pages. It offers rich developer community support and has been used by more than 50+ projects. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Microlink and Scrapy, you can also consider the following products

BrowserCat - Easy, fast, and reliable browser automation and headless browser APIs. The web is messy, but your code shouldn't be.

Apify - Apify is a web scraping and automation platform that can turn any website into an API.

ParseHub - ParseHub is a free web scraping tool. With our advanced web scraper, extracting data is as easy as clicking the data you need.

Scraper API - Scale Data Collection with a Simple API.

Octoparse - Octoparse provides easy web scraping for anyone. Our advanced web crawler, allows users to turn web pages into structured spreadsheets within clicks.

ScrapeHero - A web scraping service to collect data from websites, without any programming or DIY tools.