Best Python Scraping Libraries in 2026

A comparison of the top Python libraries for web scraping: Requests, Scrapy, Playwright, Selenium, and HTTPX. Which one should you use?

Choosing the right scraping library depends on your use case. Here is a quick comparison of the most popular options.

Quick Comparison

Library	Best For	JS Rendering	Speed	Learning Curve
Requests + BS4	Simple static pages	No	Fast	Easy
Scrapy	Large-scale crawling	No (without Splash)	Very fast	Medium
Playwright	JS-heavy sites	Yes	Medium	Medium
Selenium	Legacy browser automation	Yes	Slow	Easy
HTTPX	Async scraping	No	Fast	Easy

Requests + BeautifulSoup

The classic combo. Simple, reliable, and sufficient for 80% of scraping tasks. If the page source (View Source) contains the data you need, start here.

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

resp = requests.get("https://example.com")
soup = BeautifulSoup(resp.text, "html.parser")

Scrapy

A full framework for building web crawlers. Built-in support for pipelines, middleware, retries, and concurrent requests. Best for crawling thousands to millions of pages.

Playwright

The modern choice for scraping JavaScript-rendered pages. Faster and more reliable than Selenium. Supports Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit.

Selenium

Still widely used but showing its age. Playwright has largely replaced it for new projects. Use Selenium only if you need specific browser extensions or have existing Selenium code.

HTTPX

A modern replacement for Requests with async support. Great for scraping many pages concurrently without the overhead of a full browser.

Our Recommendation

Start with Requests + BeautifulSoup, simple and fast
Upgrade to Playwright if you need JS rendering
Use Scrapy for large-scale production crawlers
Use HTTPX if you need async performance

Happy scraping!