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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Crawlee – Web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js

Hey HN, This is Jan, founder of Apify, a web scraping and automation platform. Drawing on our team's years of experience, today we're launching Crawlee [1], the web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js that's designed for the fastest development and maximum reliability in production. For details, see the short video [2] or read the announcement blog post [3]. Main features: - Supports headless browsers with Playwright or Puppeteer - Supports raw HTTP crawling with Cheerio or JSDOM - Automated parallelization and scaling of crawlers for best performance - Avoids blocking using…

Crawlee is a Node.js library for web scraping and browser automation that supports both headless browsers like Playwright and Puppeteer, as well as raw HTTP crawling with Cheerio or JSDOM. It handles parallelization… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier. Crawlee – Web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js launched in 2022; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    Crawlee—A web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js to build reliable crawlers. In JavaScript and TypeScript. Extract data for AI, LLMs, RAG, or GPTs. Download HTML, PDF, JPG, PNG, and other files from websites. Works with Puppeteer, Playwright, Cheerio, JSDOM, and raw HTTP. Both headf

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2
    Crawlee▲229

    Build reliable web scrapers and robots, fast!

    2022 · crawlee.dev · its alternatives →

  3. 3
    Crawly▲606

    Never write another web scraper

    2016 · crawly.diffbot.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Distributed crawler powered by Headless Chrome. Contribute to yujiosaka/headless-chrome-crawler development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5
    scrape-it▲186

    A Node.js scraper for humans.

    2016 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Learn how to scrape webpages using Puppeteer and Serverless Functions built with OpenFaaS.

    2020 · openfaas.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Turn any website into an API in just a few seconds.

    2019 · simplescraper.io · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Getting started with Puppeteer and Chrome Headless for Web Scraping - emadehsan/thal

    2017 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    The easiest web scraping API on the web

    2019 · scrapingbee.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10DR

    I'd like to invite everyone to try out DontBeEvil.rip, an experimental search engine for developers. tl;dr $ alias rip="curl -G -H 'Accept: text/plain' --url https://dontbeevil.rip/search --data-urlencode " $ rip 'q=Heartbleed bug' DontBeEvil.rip is a year long experiment to see if a small team can build a developer-focused search engine that is self-sustaining on $10 monthly subscriptions. It works by only indexing high-quality resources that are relevant to developers. You won't get useless listicles because we'll never crawl them. Relevant urls are harvested from HN,…

    2022 · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Hello, My name is Yahia, I've been working on scraping products for a long time and maintain a couple of free sites in my spare time (E.g. knifegeek.io) What prompted this is i've rebuilt scraping infra at every company I've started and finally just made it a product. Pass a URL, get clean markdown, html, images, sitemap or pass a domain, get logos, colors, socials, industry data. Goal is to offer a better service than VC funded competitors at a fraction of the cost. Stealth is included and automatic at no additional cost (normally an upcharge by alternatives). Would love your honest thoughts.

    Jul 2026 · context.dev · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Thousands of tools to automate your business. Get real-time web data, track competitors, generate leads, and integrate your apps and AI agents.

    2015 · apifier.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13
    Apifier▲223

    The web scraping and automation platform

    2015 · apify.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Web scraping made simple — extract data with our free Chrome extension and powerful cloud platform. Turn websites into structured data at scale, via dashboard or API.

    2019 · simplescraper.io · its alternatives →

  15. 15
    Apify▲271

    Thousands of tools to automate your business. Get real-time web data, track competitors, generate leads, and integrate your apps and AI agents.

    2020 · apify.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Ultra-fast desktop & CLI app that finds your SEO & AEO issues and allows you to extract your content as Markdown

    Mar 2026 · crawler.sh · its alternatives →

  17. 17
    ScrapeOwl▲389

    Simple and powerful web scraping API

    2020 · scrapeowl.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Swiss army knife for high-performance web scraping

    2023 · scrapeninja.net · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Scrape the web at scale without getting blocked

    2021 · datashake.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    The biggest marketplace of readymade no code web scrapers

    2021 · webautomation.io · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Hey HN, I built Crawlee Cloud, an open-source, self-hosted platform that lets you run Crawlee and Apify Actors on your own infrastructure. The problem: The Apify ecosystem (Crawlee, SDK, Actors) is fantastic for web scraping, but it's tied to their cloud. If you want to keep your data on-prem, run on your own servers, or save on costs at scale, you're stuck. The solution: Crawlee Cloud implements Apify's REST API so your existing Actors work without code changes. Just point APIFY_API_BASE_URL to your own server. What's included: SDK compatible: Datasets, Key-Value Stores, Request Queues all…

    Jan 2026 · crawlee.cloud · its alternatives →

  22. 22IM

    Hi! I'm Marcell, and I'm working on FetchFox (https://fetchfoxai.com). It's a Chrome extension that lets you use AI to scrape any website for any data. I'd love to get your feedback. Here's a quick demo showing how you can use it to scrape leads from an auto dealer directory. What's cool is that it scrapes non-uniform pages, which is quite hard to do with "traditional" scrapers: https://youtu.be/wPbyPSFsqzA A little background: I've written lots and lots of scrapers over the last 10+ years. They're fun to write when they work, but the internet has changed in ways…

    2024 · fetchfoxai.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    A complete and versatile web scraper. Contribute to ruipgil/scraperjs development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2014 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24
    SCRAPR▲260

    The data layer for the agentic web

    Mar 2026 · scraprbeta.vercel.app · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →