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

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:

Copynpm 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.