If you want to scrape static pages that don’t require any interactions like clicks, JS rendering, or submitting forms, Cheerio is the best option, but If the website uses any form of Javascript to inject new content, you’ll need to use Puppeteer.
Should You Use Cheerio or Puppeteer for Web Scraping?Īlthough you might already have an idea of the best scenarios, let us take all doubts out of the way. In web scraping, Puppeteer gives our script all the power of a browser engine, allowing us to scrape pages that require Javascript execution (like SPAs), scrape infinite scrolling, dynamic content, and more. It “ provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol.” On the other hand, Puppeteer is actually a browser automation tool, designed to mimic users’ behavior to test websites and web applications. Although in small projects we won’t notice, in large scraping tasks it will become a big time saver. Because Cheerio doesn’t render the website like a browser (it doesn’t apply CSS or load external resources), Cheerio is lightweight and fast. However, Cheerio is well known for its speed. To select elements, we can use CSS and XPath selectors, making navigating the DOM easier. What is Cheerio?Ĭheerio is a Node.js framework that parses raw HTML and XML data and provides a consistent DOM model to help us traverse and manipulate the result data structure. Now that you have a big picture vision, let’s dive deeper into what each library has to offer and how you can use them to extract alternative data from the web. Puppeteer can take screenshots, submit forms and make PDFs.Cheerio makes extracting data super simple using JQuery like syntax and CSS/XPath selectors to navigate the DOM.Compared to Cheerio, Puppeteer is quite slow.Cheerio is lightning fast in comparison to Puppeteer.It has a steep learning curve as it has more functionalities and requires Async for better results.It has an easy learning curve thanks to its simple syntax.Puppeteer can interact with websites, accessing content behind login forms and scripts.Cheerio can’t interact with the site or access content behind scripts.It can execute Javascript, making it able to scrape dynamic pages like single-page applications (SPAs).It’s a DOM parser, able to parser HTML and XML files.Puppeteer was designed for browser automation and testing.Cheerio was built with web scraping in mind.However, they have major differences that you need to consider before picking a tool for your project.īefore moving into the details for each library, here’s an overview comparison between Cheerio and Puppeteer: Cheerio Cheerio vs Puppeteer: Differences and When to Use ThemĬheerio and Puppeteer are both libraries made for Node.js (a backend runtime environment for Javascript) that can be used for scraping the web.
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