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Comment on Show HN: Crawlee – Web scraping and browser automation library for Node.jsparent

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for me will always be stealthiness/human like behavior no matter how crappy the dev experience is

Can't say I agree. The biggest value for me is being able to respond to site changes quickly. Having a key bot offline for an extended period of time can be costly, so being able to update, test and deploy it quickly is a big selling point. The vast majority of sites, including major companies, have very rudimentary bot detection, and a high-quality proxy provider is often all you need to bypass it.

As for the advanced methods like recaptcha 3 and cloudflare, I don't know of any framework that passes those out of the box anyways, so might as well use something that's easy to hack on and implement your own bypasses as necessary.

We do a lot of web scraping (hundreds of millions of requests, multiple terabytes of data per month) and have been using Crawlee - previously known as Apify SDK - since its v0.20 days. We adopted it for exactly this reason. It's extremely versatile and very pleasant to build on. The combination of Node, JS and Crawlee's modular SDK offers a sweet spot for scraping that imho is light years ahead of anything else.

Helps too that the apify devs themselves are nice and super responsive (we've had quite a few PRs merged over the last couple of years). The SDK code (and supporting libs like browser-tool, got-scraping) is clean and very easy to read/follow/extend (happy to hear too that the license is going to remain unchanged).

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