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Web scraping has become an essential method of getting data from multiple websites on a large scale. It is crucial for developers, data analysts, researchers, marketers, and business owners, who need data to improve their work processes or make data-driven and critical decisions. It can help reduce hiring costs, save time, and perform tasks at scale.
Web development – illustrative photo. Image credit: Campaign Creators via Unsplash, free license
Many websites have put measures in place to hinder web scraping activities on their platform. Because of that, web scrapers have to use smart and stealthy technologies to bypass these measures.
This article shows a deep dive into two widely-adopted tools and still growing in adoption for web scraping: Playwright vs Puppeteer. We discuss their histories, unique features, pros, and cons.
Table of Contents
History of Playwright and Puppeteer
Many web scraping tools evolved as part of the efforts to ease web scraping processes and bypass anti-bot mechanisms.
Playwright is an open-source JS-based tool that was introduced in 2019 by Microsoft. It is popularly known for its fast and reliable cross-browser automation, which it does via a single API.
Puppeteer, on the other hand, is owned by Google. It was released by the Chrome DevTools team in 2017. It provides a high-level API for controlling headless Chrome or Chrome or Chromium**.** Nowadays, it is an open-source project that receives contributions from developers across the globe. It is known for enabling seamless control and management of a headless Chrome browser and easy integration with Chrome Dev Tools.
The Characteristics of Playwright
Let’s discuss Playwright in detail and all the benefits it offers.
Pros
Using Playwright, you have access to various tools and APIs to extract data and even images from pages. You also have the option of exporting the collated data in a format that suits you such as CSV and JSON. Playwright has many features that make it an great tool for web scraping. See some more of them below.
- Multi-Browser Compatibility:
The most popular Playwright feature is its multi-browser support, enabling developers to extract data from Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge (with Chromium), Apple Safari (with WebKit), and Mozilla Firefox.
Playwright enables a web scraper to avoid getting blocked by websites with bot detection measures. Its cross-browser support helps save time and avoid getting blocked. You can write one script to work across multiple browsers.
Playwright also runs test cases to compare the loading and rendering time, memory consumption, and script execution timeline for different browsers. It then identifies the most suitable per use case with the said test results.
- Rich Functionality and Comprehensive API
Playwright’s has an extensive API that allows its users to easily control their web scraping processes.
With Playwright, you perform activities on web pages, manipulate elements, and get data effectively. With Playwright, you can type, click, and choose from options. Its auto-wait feature allows certain elements to load or waits for a specified period to pass before performing actions.
It, therefore, mimics humans’ likelihood to pause in between their activities on a website due to network issues or other reasons. It makes it more suitable for dynamic websites.
- Multiple Language Support:
You can use the Playwright API in different languages: Python, JavaScript, .NET, Java, and TypeScript. This makes it available to more developers and easy to use.
It removes the need to learn new languages in a bid to use the tool. And if you do not know any of the mentioned languages, you have access to multiple languages, of which you can choose the one you like best.
- Simple Syntax:
Playwright has a user-friendly and intuitive syntax. It is readable and clear. Whenever an error occurs in Playwright, it provides a descriptive error message specifying the source of the error, thus making debugging easy.
Cons
Despite its strengths, Playwright has its limitations. Because it is relatively new, it does not have as much community support and resources as its alternatives. Thus, it could be a bit harder for beginners to understand and begin work with it.
The Characteristics of Puppeteer
Puppeteer offers several benefits that make it an excellent tool for developers. See some of the benefits below.
Pros
- Ease of Use:
Puppeteer is designed with a simple API that reduces the learning curve for developers and makes it easier to adapt. Its detailed documentation helps developers to unblock when they encounter problems and enables efficient workflows.
- Strong Integration with Chrome DevTools:
Puppeteer has solid integration with Chrome DevTools, developer tools created by Google Chrome. You can take advantage of this to monitor network requests, debug, and inspect elements. It improves the user’s ability to understand websites while scraping.
- Wide Range of Useful Features
With Puppeteer, you can take screenshots, click buttons, fill out forms, etc. It empowers the user to work through complex website structures and extract data effectively from different websites.
Its headless browser support feature also enables you to perform tasks in the background and save memory and time. Headless browsers lack graphical user interfaces (GUIs). That is, they are devoid of menu bars, buttons, and other elements that make a browser visually appealing to the users.
With headless browsers, you can mimic human actions on a website in a way that is not detectable by the site.
Cons
Puppeteer supports only JavaScript and Chromium browsers, limiting its versatility. Also, being a community-driven project, there’s not much official support. Hence, you might not get the support immediately if you need it. This may act as a challenge when troubleshooting certain issues.
Conclusion
This article explored two popular web scraping tools: Playwright and Puppeteer. You learned about their unique benefits, pros, and cons, and why they stand out in the web scraping landscape.
To help you avoid getting blocked and crawl large amounts of data within a short time, ZenRows is a web scraping API with a powerful scraping algorithm that can be a game-changer, thus is recommended. One single API call will manage all the anti-bot bypassing techniques, including rotating proxies, headless browsers, and CAPTCHAs.
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