Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Scrapy VS Follow That Page

Compare Scrapy VS Follow That Page and see what are their differences

Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.

Scrapy logo Scrapy

Scrapy | A Fast and Powerful Scraping and Web Crawling Framework

Follow That Page logo Follow That Page

Follow That Page sends you an email when your favorite web pages have changed.
  • Scrapy Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-11
  • Follow That Page Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-07-29

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.

Follow That Page features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    Follow That Page is user-friendly and doesn’t require any technical expertise, making it accessible for people who want to monitor web page changes without hassle.
  • Email Alerts
    The service sends email notifications when a monitored page changes, allowing users to stay updated without constantly checking the webpage manually.
  • Customizable Frequency
    Users can set how frequently they want each page to be checked for changes, ranging from every few minutes to daily or less, depending on their needs.
  • Free and Paid Plans
    Offers both a free version with core features and a paid plan with advanced options, allowing users to choose based on their requirements and budget.

Possible disadvantages of Follow That Page

  • Limited Free Option
    The free version comes with limitations, such as the number of pages that can be monitored and the frequency of checks, which may not be sufficient for heavy users.
  • Basic Interface
    The user interface is quite simple and may lack advanced functionalities and modern design that some users expect from contemporary web applications.
  • Email Dependency
    Notifications are heavily dependent on email, which might be inconvenient for users preferring mobile notifications or in-app alerts.
  • No Mobile App
    Does not offer a mobile app, which can limit accessibility and convenience for users who prefer managing services on their smartphones.

Analysis of Scrapy

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Scrapy is a good option for those looking to implement web scraping projects due to its robust set of features, active community, and comprehensive documentation. It is particularly well-suited for projects that require scraping from multiple websites and processing large volumes of data efficiently.

Why this product is good

  • Scrapy is a popular open-source web crawling framework for Python that's designed for extensive, flexible, and efficient web scraping. Its built-in tools and features make it easy to extract data from websites quickly and automatically. Key advantages include its ability to handle requests asynchronously, its support for multiple protocols, its item pipeline feature that allows for data cleaning and storage, and its ease of integration with other Python libraries and databases.

Recommended for

    Scrapy is recommended for developers, data scientists, and businesses that need to gather data from websites efficiently. It's particularly useful for projects involving data aggregation, market research, competitive analysis, and monitoring pricing changes across various platforms.

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

Follow That Page videos

No Follow That Page videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Scrapy and Follow That Page)
Web Scraping
100 100%
0% 0
Monitoring Tools
0 0%
100% 100
Data Extraction
100 100%
0% 0
Website Monitoring
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

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

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.

Follow That Page Reviews

We have no reviews of Follow That Page yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Scrapy seems to be a lot more popular than Follow That Page. While we know about 97 links to Scrapy, we've tracked only 3 mentions of Follow That Page. 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.

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 / 9 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 / 10 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 / 12 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 / about 1 year 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
View more

Follow That Page mentions (3)

  • What are the chances of classes being cancelled tomorrow because of the typhoon?
    Just kidding. Most schools have a communication website that is updated with the latest information. If your school has one of these, try using a service that monitors webpages, and email you when it detects any changes. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Ask HN: Tool to Monitor Webpage for Changes
    I’ve had a good experience with https://followthatpage.com/. - Source: Hacker News / over 3 years ago
  • The Privacy, Security, & OSINT Show: 235-iOS 15 Privacy Guide
    Nothing fancy haha https://followthatpage.com/. Source: over 3 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Scrapy and Follow That Page, you can also consider the following products

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

WebSite-Watcher - WebSite-Watcher detects website updates and highlights all changes in the text. WebSite-Watcher monitors web pages, password protected pages, disucssion forums and much more.

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

Sken.io - The most advanced tools for tracking changes on websites.

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

ChangeTower - ChangeTower offers website monitoring tools for new content and content changes.