Comparing
HTML and XML parsing library for extracting data from web pages with a simple Pythonic API.
TypeScript-first schema declaration and validation library with static type inference
| Metric | beautifulsoup4 | zod |
|---|---|---|
| Ecosystem | Python | npm |
| Difficulty | Beginner | Beginner |
| Weekly downloads | 9.0M | 148.9M↑ |
| Latest version | v4.12.3 | v4.3.6 |
| Recipes | 2↑ | 1 |
beautifulsoup4 only
Shared
zod only
Scraping static HTML pages, extracting data from email templates, parsing HTML in tests, processing XML feeds, cleaning up messy HTML.
Use Zod at every trust boundary: parsing API responses, validating form inputs, reading environment variables, or loading config files. Any time external data enters your application, a Zod schema is the right gatekeeper.
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.
Zod adds bundle size (around 12KB gzipped). For purely server-side validation where bundle size doesn't matter but performance does, Typebox or Ajv (JSON Schema) are faster. If you're already using Pydantic on the Python side, you may want to generate Zod schemas from it rather than maintain both.
beautifulsoup4
zod