Web scraping is one of the best ways to get useful data and resources for your business. It’s a form of harvesting and extracting data from various websites. You can do this manually by accessing websites and copying what you need. When there’s a lot to copy, you can’t do it manually as it’ll take a lot of time.
To do it faster, you can make use of web scraping tools. These tools scrape data off the web in an automatic fashion depending on your configuration.
ScrapingBee and Scrapy are two very popular web scraping tools. I’ll be comparing both tools to help you find out which is the best to use. So, let’s get started with the ScrapingBee Vs Scrapy showdown.
What Is ScrapingBee?
ScrapingBee is a web scraping API that works with headless browsers. It helps you extract just the data you need and it’s an optimized tool so it doesn’t consume much CPU resources.
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This web scraping tool supports Javascript rendering. Hence, scraping configuration is super simple. It supports JavaScript libraries including React, Vue.JS, AngularJS, etc. Likewise, you can execute custom JS snippets.
There are three native ways to scrape with this tool and they include General Web Scraping, Search Engine Result Page, and Growth Hacking.
With ScrapingBee, you get access to a rotating proxy pool. This ensures automatic proxy rotation as you scrape and geotargeting. Consequently, it’ll prevent you from being blocked by websites.
What Is Scrapy?
Scrapy was formerly Scrapinghub. The tool is open-source and works for extracting data from websites. It works very fast and is very simple to use.
With Scrapy, you can easily build web spiders to carry out scraping jobs. The tool is highly extensive so you can configure the spiders in whatever way you want. Then, you can either host the scraping spiders on your own server or deploy them to Zyte Scrapy Cloud.
As an open-source tool, many programmers have contributed to the development of Scrapy. Nevertheless, the tool is currently being managed by Zyte. You can contribute easily without having to touch the core program.
ScrapingBee Vs Scrapy
Ease of use
Using ScrapingBee is easy because it features a very simple API. Although the tool isn’t open source, you can carry out any customization and integration with the API.
Scrapy is a collaborative framework. It’s easy to use because you can build your own spiders anyway you want and you have multiple deployment options. If you know Python, you can extend Scrapy to any limit.
Verdict
Being 100% open-source makes Scrapy easier to use than ScrapingBee.
Features
ScrapingBee is a proprietary scraping tool so the developers include all the necessary scraping features in the API. They are specific features for general web scraping, growth hacking, and scraping search engines.
On the other hand, Scrapy doesn’t come with a lot of in-built features. It’s up to you to build a spider and configure all the features you want to work with.
Verdict
ScrapingBee wins as it has more built-in features.
Pricing
ScrapingBee is a premium web scraping tool. There are 4 pricing plans including freelance, startup, business, and enterprise plans. The freelance plan starts at $29 per month.
You can use Scrapy for free. As an open-source platform, you just have to download the installer and run it on your computer.
Verdict
Scrapy is a more affordable web scraping tool than ScrapingBee.
Supported Platforms
ScrapingBee supports different platforms. This includes Windows, SaaS, Mac and Linux. Furthermore, it can be used as a web application.
Scrapy supports about the same platforms. It supports Mac, Windows, Linux, and BSD. However, it cannot be used as a web application.
Verdict
ScrapingBee takes a slight edge over Scrapy as it’s web-based in addition to supporting various operating systems.
Best Web Scraping Proxies
To scrape data using either ScrapingBee or Scrapy, you’ll need the best web scraping proxies. You can get the best web scraping proxies from ProxyRack.
ProxyRack is a well-known proxy service provider, offering about 800,000 unique proxies every day. It is a proxy network that you can use regardless of what country you’re trying to scrape from. Residential proxies and rotating proxies are featured and ProxyRack handles over 800 million API requests every day.
When you purchase a ProxyRack subscription, you won’t have to scrape websites with the same IP address several times. The proxy network is updated with fresh IP addresses on a regular basis. HTTP and SOCKS protocols are supported by ProxyRack. It specifically supports HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS4, SOCKS4A, and SOCKS5.
If you use a ProxyRack rotating residential proxy, you can scrape large amounts of data using residential IP addresses. This is because the proxies are long proxies with sticky IP sessions, allowing you to send a large number of queries.
The ProxyRack proxy network features IP addresses from more than 140 countries. As a result, you should be certain that you can find residential or datacenter proxies for any region you want. In addition, if you do run into a problem, there is technical assistance available to help you.
Bottom Line
So, let’s round up the ScrapingBee Vs Scrapy bout.
It’s hard to pick the best between ScrapingBee and Scrapy because both tools are good. However, Scrapy has the advantage because it’s open source.
There are so many industries and so many websites you can scrape with an open-source software like Scrapy allows you easily plug in any extra functionality you’ll need.
Nevertheless, ScrapingBee is a more ideal web scraping tool to use if you’re a business or enterprise.
