Best Open Source JavaScript Web Scraping Tools and Frameworks in 2024

JavaScript is a widely-used programming language and an ever-increasing number of websites use JavaScript to fetch and render user content. While there are various tools available for web scraping, a growing number of people are exploring JavaScript web scraping tools.

To carry out your web scraping projects, you need to familiarize yourself with web scraping tools to choose the right one. We will walk through open source JavaScript tools and frameworks that are great for web crawling, web scraping, parsing, and extracting data.

Open Source JavaScript Web Scraping Tools and Frameworks

 

Features/Tools	GitHub Stars	GitHub Forks	GitHub Open Issues	Last Updated	Documentation	License
Puppeteer	84.5k	9.1k	289	September 2023	Excellent	Apache-2.0
Playwright	54.6k	3k	659	September 2023	Good	Apache-2.0
Cheerio	26.9k	1.6k	21	September 2023	Good	MIT
Crawlee	9k	400	79	September 2023	Excellent	Apache-2.0
NodeCrawler	6.5k	913	35	December 2022	Good	MIT
Node SimpleCrawler	2.1k	366	55	March 2021	Good	BSD 2-Clause

Note: Data as on September 2023

Puppeteer

Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a powerful but simple API that allows you to control Google’s headless Chrome browser. A headless browser means you have a browser that can send and receive requests but has no GUI. It works in the background, performing actions as instructed by an API. You can truly simulate the user experience, typing where they type and clicking where they click.

A headless browser is a great tool for automated testing and server environments where you don’t need a visible UI shell. For example, you may want to run some tests against a real web page, create a PDF of it, or just inspect how the browser renders a URL. Puppeteer can also be used to take screenshots of web pages visible by default when you open a web browser.

Puppeteer’s API is very similar to Selenium WebDriver, but works only with Google Chrome. Puppeteer has a more active support than Selenium, so if you are working with Chrome, Puppeteer is your best option for web scraping.

Requires Version – Node v6.4.0, Node v7.6.0 or greater
Available Selectors – CSS
Available Data Formats – JSON

Pros

• With its full-featured API, it covers a majority of use cases
• The best option for scraping JavaScript websites on Chrome

Cons

• Only available for Chrome/Chromium browser
• Supports only JSON format

Installation
To install Puppeteer in your project run:

npm i puppeteer

This will install Puppeteer and download the recent version of Chromium browser to run the Puppeteer code. By default, Puppeteer works with the Chromium browser but you can also use Chrome. You can also use the lightweight version of Puppeteer – puppeteer core. To install type the command:

npm i puppeteer core

Best Use Case

• If you need to test the speed, performance, responsiveness, and UI of a website
• If you are using Chrome, Puppeteer is your best option for web scraping
• If the information you want is generated using

Playwright

Playwright is a Node library to automate multiple browsers with a single API. It enables cross-browser web automation that is ever-green, capable, reliable, and fast. Playwright was created to improve automated UI testing by eliminating flakiness, improving the speed of execution, and offering insights into the browser operation.

Playwright is very similar to Puppeteer in many respects. The API methods are identical in most cases, and Playwright also bundles compatible browsers by default. Playwright’s biggest differentiating point is cross-browser support. It can drive Chromium, WebKit, MS Edge, and Firefox.

A noteworthy difference is that Playwright has a more powerful browser context feature than Puppeteer. This lets you simulate multiple devices with a single browser instance.

Requires Version – Node.js 10.15 or above
Available Selectors – CSS
Available Data Formats – JSON

Pros

• Cross browser support
• Detailed documentation

Cons

• They have only patched the WebKit and Firefox debugging protocols, not the actual rendering engine

Installation
To install the package:

npm i -D playwright

This installs Playwright and browser binaries for Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit. Once installed, you can use Playwright in a Node.js script and automate web browser interactions.

Best use case

If you need an efficient tool as good as Puppeteer to perform UI testing but across multiple browsers, you should use Playwright.

Cheerio

Cheerio is a library that parses raw HTML and XML documents and allows you to use the syntax of jQuery while working with the downloaded data. With Cheerio, you can write filter functions to fine-tune which data you want from your selectors. If you are writing a web scraper in JavaScript, Cheerio API is a fast option that makes parsing, manipulating, and rendering efficient.

It does not – interpret the result as a web browser, produce a visual rendering, apply CSS, load external resources, or execute JavaScript. If you require any of these features, you should consider projects like PhantomJS or JSDom.

Requirements – Up to date versions of Node.js and npm
Available Selectors – CSS

Pros

• Parsing, rendering and manipulating documents is very efficient
• Flexible, easy to use
• Very fast (Preliminary end to end benchmarks suggests its 8x faster than JSDOM)

Cons

• Does not fare well for dynamic JavaScript websites

Installation
To install the required modules using  npm, simply type the following command:

npm install cheerio

Best Use Case

If you need speed, go for Cheerio.

Crawlee

Crawlee, is the successor to Apify SDK which is a Node.js library and positions itself as a universal web scraping library in JavaScript, with support for Puppeteer, Cheerio, and more. Crawlee has full TypeScript support, anti-blocking features, and a similar Apify SDK interface. It also retains all the web crawling and scraping-related tools.

Requirements – Crawlee requires Node.js 16 or higher
Available Selectors – CSS
Available Data Formats – JSON, JSONL, CSV, XML, Excel or HTML

Pros

• Runs on Node.js and it’s built in TypeScript to improve code completion
• Automatic scaling and proxy management
• Mimic browser headers and TLS fingerprints

Cons

• Single Actors (scrapers) occasionally break causing delays in data scraping
• The interface is a bit difficult to navigate, especially for new users

Installation

Add Crawlee to any Node.js project by running:

npm install crawlee

Best Use Case

If you need a better developer experience and powerful anti-blocking features.

NodeCrawler

NodeCrawler is a popular web crawler for NodeJS, making it a very fast crawling solution. If you prefer coding in JavaScript, or you are dealing with mostly a JavaScript project, NodeCrawler will be the most suitable web crawler to use. Its installation is pretty simple too. JSDOM and Cheerio (used for HTML parsing) use it for server-side rendering, with JSDOM being more robust.

Requires Version – Node v4.0.0 or greater
Available Selectors – CSS, XPath
Available Data Formats – CSV, JSON, XML

Pros

• Easy installation

Cons

• It has no Promise support

Installation
To install this package with npm:

npm install crawler

Best Use Case

If you need a lightweight web crawler that combines efficiency and convenience.

Node SimpleCrawler

 SimpleCrawler is designed to provide a basic, flexible, and robust API for crawling websites. It was written to archive, analyze, and search some very large websites and can get through hundreds of thousands of pages and write large volumes of data without issue. It has a lot of useful events that can help you track the progress of your crawling process. This crawler is extremely configurable and there’s a long list of settings you can change to adapt it to your specific needs.

Requirements – Node.js 8.0+

Pros

• Respects robot.txt rules
• Highly configurable
• Easy setup and installation

Cons

• Does not download the response body when it encounters an HTTP error status in the response
• No promise support
• May get invalid URLs because of its brute force approach

Installation
To install simplecrawler type the command:

npm install --save simplecrawler

Best Use Case

If you need to start off with a flexible and configurable base for writing your own crawler

Wrapping Up

These are just some of the open-source JavaScript web scraping tools and frameworks you can use for your web scraping projects. If you have greater scraping requirements or would like to scrape on a much larger scale it’s better to use web scraping services.

If you aren’t proficient with programming or your needs are complex, or you need large volumes of data to be scraped, there are great web scraping services that will suit your requirements to make the job easier for you.

You can save time and get clean, structured data by trying us out instead – we are a full-service provider that doesn’t require the use of any tools and all you get is clean data without any hassles.