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Scrapy VS PHP

Compare Scrapy VS PHP and see what are their differences

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Scrapy logo Scrapy

Scrapy | A Fast and Powerful Scraping and Web Crawling Framework

PHP logo PHP

A popular general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited to web development
  • Scrapy Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-11
  • PHP Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-07-21

We recommend LibHunt PHP for discovery and comparisons of trending PHP projects.

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.

PHP features and specs

  • Cost-Effective
    PHP is an open-source language, meaning it is free to use. This helps reduce the overall cost of a project.
  • Large Community
    PHP has a large and active community. This means vast amounts of documentation, tutorials, and third-party resources are available.
  • Cross-Platform
    PHP is platform-independent and can run on various operating systems like Windows, Linux, and macOS.
  • Database Support
    PHP supports a wide range of databases including MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and more.
  • Speed
    PHP is generally fast, especially when used with built-in tools and extensions. It integrates easily with web servers like Apache.
  • Built-in Functions
    PHP comes with a vast range of built-in functions and libraries, which makes developing common functionalities easier and faster.
  • Server-Side Scripting
    PHP is designed specifically for server-side scripting, making it well-suited for web development.

Possible disadvantages of PHP

  • Security
    If not properly managed, PHP applications can be vulnerable to security threats like SQL injection, XSS, and others.
  • Inconsistency
    PHP's function naming and parameter ordering can be inconsistent, which can make the language difficult to learn and use efficiently.
  • Performance
    While fast for many tasks, PHP can struggle with performance for high-resource applications compared to other languages like Node.js or Python.
  • Error Handling
    Error handling in PHP is less efficient and more cumbersome compared to modern languages like Python or JavaScript.
  • Concurrency
    PHP lacks native support for multi-threading, which can be a limitation for applications requiring high concurrency.
  • Old Codebases
    Many older PHP applications use outdated coding practices, making maintaining and updating them more difficult and costly.
  • Type System
    PHP historically had a weak typing system, though recent versions have introduced better type support, it's still a drawback for older codebases.

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.

Analysis of PHP

Overall verdict

  • PHP is a solid choice for web development, especially if you are working with server-side tasks. While it may not be as modern as some newer languages or frameworks, it is still reliable, widely supported, and serves as the backbone for many popular content management systems like WordPress.

Why this product is good

  • Simplicity
    PHP is known for its simplicity and ease of learning, making it accessible for beginners.
  • Performance
    With the release of PHP 7 and later versions, significant performance improvements have been made.
  • Community support
    It has extensive community support and a vast array of libraries and frameworks.
  • Hosting compatibility
    PHP is compatible with most web hosting services, offering a seamless deployment experience.

Recommended for

  • Beginners looking to get into web development
  • Developers building or maintaining traditional server-side web applications
  • Projects requiring wide hosting service compatibility
  • Existing projects using CMS like WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal

Scrapy videos

+ Add

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

PHP videos

+ Add

Is PHP a SCAM? Watch this VIDEO Before You Join!

More videos:

  • Review - For PHP Agents - Advice On Making The Most Of Your Insurance Sales Career

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Scrapy and PHP)

Scrapy

PHP

Web Scraping
100 100%
Web Scraping
0% 0
Programming Language
0 0%
Programming Language
100% 100
Data Extraction
100 100%
Data Extraction
0% 0
OOP
0 0%
OOP
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 PHP

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.
Source: www.dashtech.org

PHP Reviews

Top 10 Rust Alternatives
PHP is another general purpose-based computing language. This language is mostly found in HTML. It is usually used for the management of content that is based on dynamic information.
Source: blog.back4app.com
Top 20 Javascript Libraries
As the name suggests, JsPHP is a Javascript library for PHP API to be available in the JS environment. It is open-source and provides a compelling interface for JS developers who work in PHP. JsPHP can work in tandem with other libraries in an application. JsPHP supports PHP functions, including regular expressions, date-time evaluations, JSON, error handling, object...
Source: hackr.io
The 10 Best Programming Languages to Learn Today
What kind of development projects do you want to work on? If career flexibility is a priority, learning Python or C++ will allow you to work across different types of programming. If your passion is web development, learning JavaScript or PHP is a smart choice.
Source: ict.gov.ge

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Scrapy should be more popular than PHP. It has been mentiond 97 times since March 2021. 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 / 10 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 / 11 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

PHP mentions (54)

  • The Lost Art of Reading Documentation
    I remember being 15 (18 years ago 🥲) and learning PHP. Stack Overflow wasn’t as big yet, and finding answers often meant digging through forums filled with half-baked solutions, each dependent on specific hosting configurations. There was no universal standard, some hosts supported certain php.ini settings while others didn’t. The only reliable resource? The official PHP documentation: php.net. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Using named arguments in php8 and up
    That's the first I've heard of it, and I like it! I can't tell you the number of trips to php.net to look at argument order for a function. Is it haystack/needle, or needle/haystack? Of course it could turn into the same thing w/ argument names (is it whole_name or full_name?), but I'm going to use it. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • How to display results from multiple SQL queries in the same table cell?
    Prepare to spend a fair bit of time reading and going back to phptherightway.com and php.net. I've also found this Tutorial from Envato Tuts+ to be quite good. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Beginner searching for set up resources
    All I want to do with php is to have a recurring navbar on a website. I don't know what to do next. So far I've tried php.net's manual, w3scchool's tutorial and the set up part of first five recommended php tutorials on youtube. I have also spent hours on stackoverflow, which got me even more confused. The more I read, the less nothing makes sense to me and I don't know where the problem is. Source: about 2 years ago
  • date_format crashing on NULL values after upgrade to PHP 8.x
    I tried looking at the upgrade from 7.4 to 8.0 docs on php.net but I don't see anything regarding any changes to this function. Any ideas? Source: about 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

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

Python - Python is a clear and powerful object-oriented programming language, comparable to Perl, Ruby, Scheme, or Java.

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

JavaScript - Lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions

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

Java - A concurrent, class-based, object-oriented, language specifically designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible

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