Web Scraping with Python: BeautifulSoup vs Selenium vs Scrapy

Three main tools for web scraping in Python. Each has its use case.

BeautifulSoup — Best for simple HTML

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
r = requests.get('https://example.com')
soup = BeautifulSoup(r.text, 'html.parser')
titles = soup.find_all('h2')

Use when: Static HTML, no JavaScript needed, fast scraping.

Selenium — Best for JavaScript-heavy sites

Use when: The site loads content via JavaScript. Slower but handles dynamic content.

Scrapy — Best for large-scale scraping

Use when: You need to scrape thousands of pages with rate limiting and pipelines.

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