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Scrapy VS Scraper API

Compare Scrapy VS Scraper API and see what are their differences

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Scrapy logo Scrapy

Scrapy | A Fast and Powerful Scraping and Web Crawling Framework

Scraper API logo Scraper API

Scale Data Collection with a Simple API.
  • Scrapy Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-11
  • Scraper API Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-10-30
  • Scraper API
    Image date //
    2025-03-19
  • Scraper API
    Image date //
    2025-03-19
  • Scraper API
    Image date //
    2025-03-19

ScraperAPI is a powerful and efficient web scraping API and tool designed to empower developers, data scientists, and businesses with reliable data extraction at scale. Our robust proxy API for web scraping simplifies web scraping, ensuring consistent access to vital web data without the frustration of IP bans or rate limits.

We take the complexity out of web scraping by handling the technical hurdles, including intelligent IP rotation, automatic CAPTCHA resolution, advanced parsing, and seamless JavaScript rendering. This allows you to focus on extracting valuable insights, making your web scraping projects more efficient and straightforward.

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.

Scraper API features and specs

  • Proxy API for Web Scraping
    Access global data sources without getting blocked. Our intelligent system dynamically manages proxies, ensuring a smooth and uninterrupted data flow for your web scraping tool needs.
  • Automatic CAPTCHA Handling
    Say goodbye to manual CAPTCHA solving. ScraperAPI automatically handles CAPTCHAs, allowing for continuous and efficient scraping.
  • Headless Browser JavaScript Rendering
    Extract data from complex, dynamic websites with our built-in rendering engine and browser interaction capabilities. Perfect for scraping modern, JavaScript-heavy sites.
  • Highly Scalable Infrastructure
    Handle millions of asynchronous requests with our robust and efficient infrastructure. Whether you're scraping a few pages or millions, we've got you covered.
  • Developer-Friendly Integration
    Seamlessly integrate ScraperAPI into your projects using Python, Node.js, or any other programming language. Our intuitive API and comprehensive documentation make integration a breeze.
  • Enhanced Security & Compliance
    ScraperAPI prioritizes data security and compliance. We adhere to industry best practices, including data encryption and secure proxy management, ensuring your scraping operations remain secure and compliant with relevant regulations.

Possible disadvantages of Scraper API

  • Cost
    While ScraperAPI offers a free tier, the cost can become significant for larger projects as the pricing increases with the number of requests, which might not be cost-effective for very high volume scraping operations.
  • Rate Limits
    Even on the higher-tier plans, there are rate limits that could potentially hamper scraping tasks if the volume is extremely high or if the project requires real-time data extraction at a rapid pace.
  • Data Privacy Concerns
    Using a third-party service for scraping can raise data privacy concerns, particularly for sensitive or proprietary information, as data passes through an external server.
  • Dependency on External Service
    Relying on an external service like ScraperAPI introduces a dependency that could affect your operations if the API experiences downtime or if there are changes in the service terms.
  • Limited Customization
    While ScraperAPI simplifies many aspects of web scraping, it may not offer the same level of customization and control as developing a custom scraping solution tailored to specific needs.

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

+ 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

Scraper API videos

No Scraper API videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Scrapy and Scraper API)

Scrapy

Scraper API

Web Scraping
64 64%
Web Scraping
36% 36
Data Extraction
66 66%
Data Extraction
34% 34
Data
100 100%
Data
0% 0
Web Scraping API
0 0%
Web Scraping API
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Scrapy and Scraper API. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Reviews

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

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

Scraper API Reviews

  1. Hasan
    · Working at Sociality.io ·

    We are using Scraper API more than 6 months. The product is very effective and we integrate it into our SaaS software.

Best Data Scraping Tools
Scraper API deals with proxies, browsers, CAPTCHAS; thus you can get the raw HTML at any time from any website.
Source: pamelaewallaceu.medium.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Scrapy seems to be a lot more popular than Scraper API. While we know about 97 links to Scrapy, we've tracked only 1 mention of Scraper API. 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 / about 1 year 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 / about 1 year 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 / over 1 year 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 / over 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 / almost 2 years ago
View more

Scraper API mentions (1)

What are some alternatives?

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

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.

Bright Data - World's largest proxy service with a residential proxy network of 72M IPs worldwide and proxy management interface for zero coding.

import.io - Import. io helps its users find the internet data they need, organize and store it, and transform it into a format that provides them with the context they need.

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

ScrapingBee - ScrapingBee is a Web Scraping API that handles proxies and Headless browser for you, so you can focus on extracting the data you want, and nothing else.

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