How to Choose a Web Scraping Tool for AI

Choosing the right web scraping approach depends on your scale, technical requirements, and budget. Here's a framework for making the decision.

Decision Framework

Question 1: What's your scale?

• <100 pages/day: DIY libraries work fine
• 100-10,000 pages/day: Consider managed services
• >10,000 pages/day: Need enterprise solution

Question 2: What sites are you scraping?

• Simple HTML: Beautiful Soup, Cheerio
• JavaScript SPAs: Puppeteer, Playwright
• Protected sites: Managed API (Tryb, Bright Data)

Question 3: Do you need infrastructure?

• Yes, I can manage it: Self-hosted Playwright
• No, I want simplicity: Managed API

Tool Comparison

Tool	Type	Best For	Limitation
Beautiful Soup	Library	Simple HTML parsing	No JS rendering
Puppeteer	Library	Full browser control	Infrastructure needed
Playwright	Library	Cross-browser testing	Infrastructure needed
Scrapy	Framework	Large-scale crawling	Steep learning curve
Tryb	API	AI applications	Cost per request
Apify	Platform	Custom actors	Complexity

Recommendation by Use Case

Use Case	Recommended	Why
AI Agent web access	Tryb API	Reliable, clean output, simple integration
Large-scale crawling	Scrapy + Playwright	Control and scale
One-off data extraction	Beautiful Soup	Quick and simple
E-commerce monitoring	Apify actors	Pre-built solutions

Related Comparisons

• Firecrawl vs Jina vs Tryb
• Pricing Comparison Guide