MechanicalSoup VS crawlee

Language: Python | GitHub: 4.7K+ stars | link

MechanicalSoup is a Python library for web scraping that combines the simplicity of Requests with the convenience of BeautifulSoup. It's particularly useful for interacting with web forms, like login pages. Here's a basic example to illustrate how you can use MechanicalSoup for web scraping:

Try with Mechanicalsoup https://mechanicalsoup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

You should try MechanicalSoup it uses Beautifulsoup but provides a simpler API using its StatefulBrowser filling forms and doing some other stuff is easier than just directly using requests and Beautifulsoup.

MechanicalSoup

I haven't shipped Crawlee yet, but it's been on my bookmarks list since I started building the itch.io ETL. My current approach is fetch + manual parsing, which works for known endpoints. Crawlee adds request queue persistence, rate limiting, and a cheerio integration for HTML extraction, all in TypeScript with native ESM support.

After trying Scrapy, Playwright, raw Axios, and half a dozen other tools, I settled on Crawlee with Puppeteer. Here's why:

If you aren't using Crawlee, you're playing on hard mode. It’s the engine behind all my scrapers. It handles the boring stuff—request retries, proxy rotation, and session management—so I can focus on the parsing logic. The CheerioCrawler is my favorite for speed, while PlaywrightCrawler is my heavy hitter for dynamic sites.

Here's a working scraper using Crawlee (CheerioCrawler) that extracts product data from search results:

Crawlee is a powerful, open-source web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js. It's built to create reliable, production-ready crawlers that can mimic human behavior and evade basic bot detection.

What I have seen it is hard to tell what "serious scrapers" use. They use many things. Some use this, some not. This is what I have learned reading webscraping on reddit. Nobody speaks things like that out loud.

There are many tools, see links below

Personally I think that running selenium can be a bottle neck, as it does not play nice, sometimes processes break, even system sometimes requires restart because of things blocked, can be memory hog, etc. etc. That is my experience.

To be able to scale I think you have to have your own implementation. Serious scrapers complain about people using selenium, or derivatives as noobs, who will come back asking why page X does not work in scraping mechanisms.

https://github.com/lexiforest/curl_cffi

https://github.com/encode/httpx

https://github.com/scrapy/scrapy

https://github.com/apify/crawlee

If you're a fan of Playwright check out Crawlee [0]. I've used it for a few small projects and it's been faster for me to get what I've needed done.

[0] https://crawlee.dev/

uvx crawlee['cli'] create tiktok-crawlee --crawler-type playwright --http-client httpx --package-manager uv --apify --start-url 'https://crawlee.dev'

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