I identified ten leading self-hosted web-scraping and browser-automation frameworks, spanning headless-browser drivers, high-level crawlers, and API-first services. Only Firecrawl offers built-in Markdown output, converting scraped pages directly into clean Markdown; all others require either custom pipelines or external libraries (e.g. Turndown) to transform HTML/text into Markdown. Here’s a quick rundown:
- Firecrawl (Node, Python, Go SDKs): API-first scraper with native Markdown output and AI-powered extraction citeturn0search0turn0search11
- Playwright (TS/JS, Python, C#, Java): Cross-browser headless automation; no native Markdown conversion citeturn1search0turn1search12
- Puppeteer (JS/TS): Headless Chrome/Firefox control; requires manual Markdown transformation citeturn5search0
- Scrapy (Python): Asynchronous HTTP crawler; extensible pipelines but no built-in Markdown citeturn6search0
- Apify SDK (JS/TS): Scalable crawler on Puppeteer; rich API but no Markdown output citeturn7search1
- Selenium (Java, Python, C#, Ruby, JS): WebDriver automation; generic browser control, no Markdown citeturn8search0
- Headless Chrome Crawler (JS/TS): Promise-based crawler on Puppeteer; CSV/JSON out, no Markdown citeturn4search0
- Colly (Go): Fast HTTP scraper; supports robots.txt and parallelism, no Markdown citeturn2search0
- simplecrawler (JS): Event-driven Node crawler; basic link discovery, no Markdown citeturn3search0
- MechanicalSoup (Python): Requests+BeautifulSoup for form-based sites; no JS support or Markdown citeturn9search0
| Tool | GitHub Link |
|---|---|
| Firecrawl | https://github.com/mendableai/firecrawl-mcp-server citeturn0search8 |
| Playwright | https://github.com/microsoft/playwright citeturn1search0 |
| Puppeteer | https://github.com/puppeteer/puppeteer citeturn5search0 |
| Scrapy | https://github.com/scrapy/scrapy citeturn6search0 |
| Apify SDK | https://github.com/apify/apify-sdk-js citeturn7search5 |
| Selenium | https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium citeturn8search0 |
| Headless Chrome Crawler | https://github.com/yujiosaka/headless-chrome-crawler citeturn4search0 |
| Colly | https://github.com/gocolly/colly citeturn2search0 |
| simplecrawler | https://github.com/simplecrawler/simplecrawler citeturn3search0 |
| MechanicalSoup | https://github.com/MechanicalSoup/MechanicalSoup citeturn9search0 |
| Feature | Firecrawl | Playwright | Puppeteer | Scrapy | Apify SDK | Selenium | HCCrawler | Colly | simplecrawler | MechanicalSoup |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Headless Browser | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| JS-Rendered Content | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✕ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Async/Parallel | API rate limits | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✕ |
| Native Markdown | ✔️ citeturn0search11 | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Language | Node/Python/Go | TypeScript/JS, Python… | JS/TS | Python | JS/TS | Java, Python… | JavaScript | Go | JavaScript | Python |
| Community & Maintenance | Medium (2.7k⭐) | Very High (71.8k⭐) | Very High (90.5k⭐) | Very High (54.9k⭐) | High (17.5k⭐) | Very High (32.1k⭐) | Medium (3.3k⭐) | High (24.1k⭐) | Medium (2.1k⭐) | Medium (4.7k⭐) |
Table sources: respective GitHub repositories and docs.
- If you need out-of-the-box Markdown: Firecrawl is unique in shipping clean Markdown directly—ideal for LLM pipelines or static-site generation citeturn0search11.
- For pure browser automation: Playwright or Puppeteer offer the most robust cross-browser support and ecosystem integration citeturn1search0turn5search0.
- For large-scale Python crawling: Scrapy remains the go-to for high-throughput, asynchronous scraping with rich extensions citeturn6search0.
- Lightweight, language-specific needs: Colly (Go) and MechanicalSoup (Python) are excellent for simpler tasks where JS rendering isn’t required citeturn2search0turn9search0.
- Custom Markdown pipelines: Combine any headless tool (Playwright/Puppeteer) with Turndown or Python’s markdownify to post-process HTML.
- Hybrid setups: Use Scrapy for link management + Playwright for page rendering, stitching results via a shared queue.
- Serverless deployments: Deploy lightweight crawlers (Colly, simplecrawler) in containers or AWS Lambda for burst-scale jobs.
What’s your primary focus—maximizing Markdown-ready output, pure rendering fidelity, or raw scraping throughput? Which of these trade-offs align best with your project’s long-term automation and maintenance goals?