pkgdocs/compare/beautifulsoup4 vs Scrapy

Comparing

Python

beautifulsoup4

HTML and XML parsing library for extracting data from web pages with a simple Pythonic API.

9.0M/ wk
v4.12.3
vs
Python

Scrapy

Fast, batteries-included web scraping and crawling framework for Python.

1.4M/ wk
v2.11.2
Metricbeautifulsoup4Scrapy
EcosystemPythonPython
DifficultyBeginner ✓Intermediate
Weekly downloads9.0M↑1.4M
Latest versionv4.12.3v2.11.2
Recipes22

Tags

beautifulsoup4 only

htmlparsingwebxml

Shared

scraping

Scrapy only

crawlingspiderasyncpipelines

When to use each

beautifulsoup4

Scraping static HTML pages, extracting data from email templates, parsing HTML in tests, processing XML feeds, cleaning up messy HTML.

Scrapy

Large-scale crawling, production spiders that run regularly, structured data extraction with pipelines (to DB, CSV, JSON), sites with pagination or login.

When to skip each

beautifulsoup4

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.

Scrapy

Single-page quick scrapes (use requests+BS4). JavaScript-heavy sites (use Playwright; or scrapy-playwright to integrate). When a proper API exists.

Sample recipes

beautifulsoup4

  • Scrape article titles from a news page
  • Parse a table into a list of dicts

Scrapy

  • Build a basic spider
  • Save items to a database via Pipeline
Full docs
beautifulsoup4
Full docs
Scrapy