We always wanted to make a comparison between both of these libraries we have used extensively and even written extensively about.
We love both of them, and sometimes, I fire up one or the other without almost any thought, especially for smaller, quick ones. Scrapy is the one we lean towards when it is a massive web scraping project, and beautiful soup is quicker to get going with for smaller hacks.
Here is how they compare in our opinion
Beautiful Soup vs. Scrapy
| Concern | Ideal candidate | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| Ideal of large scale projects | Scrapy | Scrapy uses Asynchronous requests vs. Beautiful soup that uses the requests module which is synchronous |
| Beginner Friendliness | Beautiful soup | Scrapy is an all in one. Soup can be used with any data as it doesn't even fetch data. You will have to use the python requests module to fetch data |
| Speed | Scrapy | Scrapy's async - BS depends on what you use behind the scenes to fetch data |
| Community support | Scrapy | Scrapy has a much larger community with many of the large scale web scraping projects done there, so the wealth of information is tremendous |
| Ideal for small scale projects | Beautiful Soup | its easier to do a smaller project with BS because it is plug and play. Scrapy has a specific way that it needs for you to set it up, so its a bigger hammer. |
| Untitled |
Both of these can be used well combined, in our opinion.
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