The web is always evolving, and five years ago, the landscape was quite different from what you see today. Reflecting on recent progress: Adobe Flash was abandoned in 2020 in favor of JavaScript, Internet Explorer (finally) became a relic of the past in 2022, and XML is almost never seen in modern APIs. Advancements like these, along with changes to standards and the introductions of new technologies, all affect how you write software and the tools you use. This highlights the importance of remaining in-the-know about what's cutting edge.
As the modern web developer's toolkit evolves, scraping developers must also adapt to the shifting digital landscape. While some oldies-but-goodies remain extremely relevant, others have recently emerged as must-haves. Today, we'll explore 10 essential scraping tools every developer needs in 2024 to stay ahead of the curve. Here's a quick rundown if you prefer to jump around:
- Proxyman
- Residential proxies
- Playwright (and Puppeteer)
- Fingerprint suite
- Postman
- Scrapy
- Crawlee
- ZenRows
- Scrapoxy
- Browser devtools
The importance of investigation
Several tools you'll see covered here are focused on the investigation phase of writing a web scraper. What's that mean? Seasoned scraper-devs will attest to the fact that crafting a scraper is about 75% investigation, and 25% writing actual code. The time you spend digging into the bones of a website/service with the aid of savvy tools heavily affects the implementation and quality of your scraper.
Rolling your eyes? Bear with us 🐻
Take a look at this example
Let's say we want to build a simple scraper that grabs all tracks from an artist's SoundCloud page. We'll use Martin Garrix's page in this exercise.
On the surface, it looks like our best bet is to comb the HTML of the page. For each song, the image, title, link, duration, likes count, and download link can all be scraped directly from the page's markup. This is a very realistic and common approach, however, not the most ideal. Here's why:
- Since the page is dynamic (content is rendered with JavaScript after the initial load), static HTTP requests won't cut it. We'll need a headless browser library (like Playwright or Selenium).
- Looks like SoundCloud implements infinite scrolling, which means our scraper will need to mimic a user scrolling down the page and waiting for content to load before scraping the next set of tracks.
- Each song will be scraped from the DOM one-by-one. To improve performance, extra logic would be needed to handle the parallelization of browser pages/instances.
All possible, but much more of a headache than necessary. Not to mention, cost is going to be unnecessarily high if we choose to run this thing in the cloud. Stepping back and peeking at the Network tab in Chrome Developer Tools, a much better approach is discovered:
Ah! An API endpoint. That mitigates the need for a headless browser, infinite scrolling, and complex parallelization code. A few new challenges are introduced, such as the need to generate a valid authorization token and dealing with pagination limits; however, with just a minute of investigation we've found a much better path forward that lowers potential cost of the scraper, and increases its:
- Reliability - HTML scraping is flaky, as structure changes frequently.
- Scalability - better performance translates to more songs scraped per minute.
- Maintainability - less code to maintain!
So, in addition to expanding your knowledge of implementation-related tools (libraries, packages, cloud services), it's just as important to train your investigation abilities, ensuring you always pick the right tool for the job. With that in mind, take a look at the tools we've highlighted as necessities for every modern scraper developer.
Proxyman
With an array of awesome features for intercepting and inspecting network traffic, Proxyman stands out as an exceptional investigation tool for web scraping. This desktop application that allows you to view and analyze the HTTP/HTTPS requests that are going through a device, which is done by routing all requests through a local proxy. Effectively sifting through traffic is easier than ever with the URL, request/response body, regular expression, and other filter options available. Scraping a native app, and not a website? Proxyman is your friend. You can also sniff traffic going through iOS devices, Android smartphones/tablets, and even mobile-device simulators.
Originally exclusive to macOS users, Proxyman semi-recently became stable on Windows, and a beta build is available for Linux.
Residential Proxies
These are IP addresses that originate from individual internet service providers (ISPs) used in homes around the world. They mimic real user traffic, making it more difficult for websites to detect and block scraping activity. Here's why residential proxies are essential for web scraping:
- Reduced blocking - General web proxies are often flagged and blocked by websites because they're known to be used for scraping. Residential proxies, on the other hand, blend in with regular user traffic, reducing the chances of getting blocked.
- Location targeting - Some websites restrict content based on geographical location. With residential proxies, you can choose an IP address from a specific country or region to access geo-restricted content.
- Concurrent requests - Residential proxies allow you to send a higher volume of concurrent requests compared to traditional proxies. This is because they originate from individual devices rather than datacenters, making it appear more natural.
When using residential proxies, it's crucial to ensure they come from a high-quality source. Many services, especially the budget options out there, offer tens of thousands of IPs; however, their proxies are oftentimes unreliable and not ethically sourced. You can secure the reliability (and legality!) of your scrapers by using proxies from a responsible service that guarantees high quality proxies, such as Ping Proxies. Learn more about this topic in Why are ethical proxies important?.
Playwright (and Puppeteer) 🎭
Playwright and Puppeteer have been the cream of the crop for a while now when it comes to headless browser automation, and remain to be powerful scraping tools in 2024. With them, you can programmatically control Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit browsers. Both are fantastic candidates in use-cases requiring automated webpage workflows (such as filling out a form), taking screenshots and generating PDFs, downloading files, SPA request interception, and extracting dynamically-generated data from HTML.
Distinguishing features: Playwright
The younger brother of the duo, Playwright was written by the same team that created Puppeteer, and improves upon its predecessor. Here are some of its distinguishing features:
- Multi-browser support - Supports Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit engines, allowing you to choose the most suitable browser for your scraping needs. Having multiple browsers at your disposal can be valuable when mitigating anti-bot detection.
- Record functionality - Has a record functionality that lets you record your interactions with a website in the browser, then convert them into automation scripts. It's a great time-saver for building scraping logic!
- Out-of-box TypeScript support - Playwright has built-in support for TypeScript, a typed superset of JavaScript, which can help improve code maintainability and catch errors early on.
Distinguishing features: Puppeteer
Originally designed for Chromium browser automation, Puppeteer is catching up to Playwright on the multi-browser front, and Firefox support is currently experimental. Here are a couple points that distinguish it from Playwright:
- Large community - Has a larger community and more resources available compared to Playwright, which is helpful when seeking solutions and troubleshooting problems. Many community-driven plugins are available for the library, such as Puppeteer Extra Stealth.
- Simple API - Puppeteer's API might be considered more straightforward and simpler to learn for beginners compared to Playwright.
Choosing between Playwright and Puppeteer
These libraries offer similar core for headless browser automation, allowing you to navigate pages, interact with elements, and execute JavaScript code. And both have relatively easy-to-learn APIs, making them accessible for developers with basic programming knowledge. So, which is the right pick for your project?
If you need multi-browser support, prefer TypeScript, or want advanced features, Playwright might be a better choice.
If you're specifically targeting Chrome or value a larger community and simpler API, Puppeteer might be a better fit.
Fingerprint Suite
Modern websites increasingly use sophisticated browser fingerprinting techniques to track and identify users. This can put a full-stop to your scraper if it's detected and starts getting restricted in some way (e.g. rate-limiting). Fingerprint Suite is a library that integrates directly with Playwright or Puppeteer, allowing you to mitigate fingerprinting-related challenges. Under the hood, it does this by overriding headers and device attributes webpages use to identify your scraper.
Postman
Generally serving as a powerful collaboration platform for API development and testing, Postman also comes in handy when investigating a website or API for scraping purposes. To scratch the surface, here are just a few of the main uses:
- Test raw HTTP requests, such as checking the response body of a raw request without loading any additional resources such as JavaScript or CSS.
- Interact with GraphQL, Websocket, and SSE endpoints.
- Modify headers, cookies, payloads, request methods, and more.
- Utilize your proxies when making requests.
In our scraping exercise above, the next plan-of-action could be to load up Postman and start testing the API endpoint we found.
Scrapy 🕷️
A free and open-source web crawling framework written in Python, Scrapy remains a popular choice for web scraping tasks due to its robust features and ease of use. It streamlines the development process by abstracting away low-level details like network requests, parsing, and downloading, allowing developers to focus on the core logic of extracting data.
Scrapy's modular architecture allows for customization at different stages of the scraping process. You can add functionalities like data-sanitization, transformation, and storage using middleware pipelines, tailoring the framework to your specific scraping needs. It's also highly scalable, being easily distributable across multiple machines to manage high volumes of concurrent requests.
Crawlee 🤖
If JavaScript is your jam, Crawlee is definitely the library to reach for. Like Scrapy, Crawlee handles many of the complexities of web scraping under the hood, allowing you to focus on the core logic of data extraction. Whether your project requires the control of a headless browser with their seamless integration with Playwright/Puppeteer, or the simplicity of plain HTTP requests, Crawlee can handle it all. Additional functionalities enhance scraping reliability and performance, such as request queueing, storage integrations, and out-of-box TypeScript support.
ZenRows
Claiming to be "The web scraping API Swiss knife", ZenRows focuses on helping you avoid common anti-bot measures, as well as jump some of the bigger hurdles when it comes to web scraping. This paid service offers features like rotating proxies, headless browser functionality, firewall bypass, and user-agent rotation. With their cutting-edge AI Web Unblocker, ZenRows is making big moves in the scraping-sphere, and is definitely worth keeping an eye on.
Scrapoxy 🔀
When scraping at scale with proxies, bans are an unfortunate reality. Too many requests being made with one proxy, or a proxy being detected as a "bot" can halt your data-extraction pipeline. Scrapoxy is a "super proxy aggregator" and rotator that serves as a router for all your scrapers running in the cloud, automatically distributing traffic evenly across all your proxies, and rotating upon ban detection to increase success rates.
Spinning up an instance in a Docker container and running it anywhere is easy, making Scrapoxy an essential to every modern high-scale scraping project.
Browser devtools ⚙️
Yup, you read that right. Devtools have been around forever, and you're probably well aware of them already, but they've made this list for the simple fact that... they really are your best friend! Most modern browsers have built-in developer tools which offer a wealth of information. Opening them up (with ⌘ + option + J on macOS, and Ctrl + Shift + J on Windows) can give you a whole lot of insight into a webpage without needing to leave the browser window. Try it out!
Elements tab
Lets you examine the HTML structure and styles of a webpage, which can be helpful for understanding how content is organized. When building CSS selectors or XPaths for use with Beautiful Soup or Cheerio, the ability to search elements by various means allows you to validate selectors with confidence before even running your scraper (use ⌘ + F/Ctrl + F).
Console tab
Allows you to run JavaScript code directly on the page itself, which can be useful for testing and debugging purposes. It'll also auto-complete the names of global DOM objects, letting you easily discover and inspect gems such as __NEXT_DATA__ on websites using Next.js, or __algolia on those using Algolia.
Network tab
As demonstrated in our exercise earlier, the Network tab allows you to inspect all HTTP requests and responses made when loading and using a webpage, heavily aiding in the investigation phase. You can also disable response caching to identify cache-related issues, block certain requests, and preserve the request log between page reloads (with the Preserve log option).
Wrap-up
Alright, that's our ten! You're now armed with the essential tools to tackle any scraping challenge that 2024 throws your way. Remember, the web evolves fast, so staying updated with the latest technologies and refining your investigation skills are key to building strong, reliable scrapers.
Happy scraping!
