Comparing
Better dates and times in Python — timezone-aware by default, human-friendly API, and natural language parsing.
HTML and XML parsing library for extracting data from web pages with a simple Pythonic API.
| Metric | arrow | beautifulsoup4 |
|---|---|---|
| Ecosystem | Python | Python |
| Difficulty | Beginner | Beginner |
| Weekly downloads | 2.5M | 9.0M↑ |
| Latest version | v1.3.0 | v4.12.3 |
| Recipes | 1 | 2↑ |
arrow only
Shared
beautifulsoup4 only
Any application dealing with dates across timezones, relative time displays ('posted 2 days ago'), date parsing from strings, date range iteration, or when you want less boilerplate than stdlib datetime.
Scraping static HTML pages, extracting data from email templates, parsing HTML in tests, processing XML feeds, cleaning up messy HTML.
High-frequency numerical date computations (use numpy datetime64 or pandas Timestamp which are faster). Arrow adds overhead per operation.
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.
arrow
beautifulsoup4