Comparing
Async http client/server framework (asyncio)
HTML and XML parsing library for extracting data from web pages with a simple Pythonic API.
| Metric | aiohttp | beautifulsoup4 |
|---|---|---|
| Ecosystem | Python | Python |
| Difficulty | Beginner | Beginner |
| Weekly downloads | 0 | 9.0M↑ |
| Latest version | v3.13.5 | v4.12.3 |
| Recipes | 1 | 2↑ |
aiohttp only
Shared
beautifulsoup4 only
Use aiohttp when you need a battle-tested async HTTP client or server, especially in applications that make many concurrent HTTP calls (scrapers, API aggregators) or build lightweight async web services. It has a mature ecosystem and is widely used in production.
Scraping static HTML pages, extracting data from email templates, parsing HTML in tests, processing XML feeds, cleaning up messy HTML.
For new async API projects, FastAPI (built on Starlette/uvicorn) has better developer ergonomics, automatic validation, and docs. For synchronous scripts, requests is simpler. httpx offers a compatible API with both sync and async modes if you want flexibility.
JavaScript-rendered pages (use Playwright or Selenium). High-volume scraping at scale (use Scrapy). When the site has a proper API — always prefer the API.
aiohttp
beautifulsoup4