Playwright vs Puppeteer for Web Scraping: An Expert‘s Guide for 2024

Web scraping is a powerful technique for extracting data from websites, but it‘s getting harder than ever to do at scale. With growing adoption of anti-bot measures like browser fingerprinting and CAPTCHAs, developers need modern tools to automate scraping while mimicking human behavior.

Enter headless browsers: special browser engines that can load and interact with web pages without the overhead of a visible user interface. Google‘s Puppeteer and Microsoft‘s Playwright are two leading Node.js libraries that make it easy to control headless browsers for web scraping. But which one should you choose in 2024?

As an expert in web scraping and proxy services, I‘ve analyzed both tools in depth to help you decide. In this guide, I‘ll compare Playwright and Puppeteer on key criteria like popularity, features, performance, and ease of use. I‘ll also share tips and best practices for using them with proxies to avoid IP blocking and CAPTCHAs. Let‘s dive in!

Popularity and Growth

First, let‘s look at some hard data on the popularity of Playwright and Puppeteer. The chart below shows the number of weekly npm downloads for each library over the past year:

Source: npm-stat.com (Jan 2023 – Jan 2024)

Puppeteer has maintained a healthy lead, recently crossing 3.5 million weekly downloads thanks to its early mover advantage as a web scraping tool. However, Playwright has nearly quadrupled its user base from ~300k to ~1.2 million downloads/week since January 2023. At this rate, it could catch up to Puppeteer by 2025.

We see a similar trajectory on GitHub, where Puppeteer has accumulated 90k stars and 10k forks since 2018, compared to 65k stars and 3.8k forks for Playwright since 2020. While Puppeteer boasts a larger community for now, Playwright is growing fast with active support from Microsoft.

Features and Ecosystem

So what can you actually do with Playwright and Puppeteer? Both allow you to automate pretty much any action a human user could perform in a browser:

• Clicking buttons and links
• Filling out and submitting forms
• Scraping page content and HTML
• Taking screenshots or generating PDFs
• Monitoring network requests and responses
• Emulating mobile devices and user agents

The table below compares the key features of both libraries:

As you can see, the two libraries are very comparable in terms of features, with Playwright having a slight edge in browser support, mobile emulation, and accessibility testing. Its Chrome+Firefox+WebKit coverage is especially handy if you need to test your scrapers across browser engines.

Where Playwright really shines is its cross-language support: in addition to JavaScript/TypeScript, it offers official bindings for Python, .NET, and Java, making it more versatile for teams working in multiple languages. Puppeteer is only available in Node.js, though there are a few unofficial ports to other languages.

For ethical scraping and avoiding bot detection, both Playwright and Puppeteer recently introduced "stealth" plugins that can spoof common browser fingerprints like the user agent, webdriver flag, and iframe details. Puppeteer‘s latest stealth mode (enabled with headless=new) is easier to configure, while Playwright requires a separate playwright-extra plugin.

Ease of Use

Both Playwright and Puppeteer are relatively intuitive for developers familiar with JavaScript and Node.js. Here‘s a quick example of how to launch a browser, navigate to a URL, and take a screenshot in each library:

Puppeteer

const puppeteer = require(‘puppeteer‘);

(async () => {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
  const page = await browser.newPage();

  await page.goto(‘https://example.com‘);
  await page.screenshot({path: ‘example.png‘});

  await browser.close();
})();

Playwright

const { chromium } = require(‘playwright‘);

(async () => {
  const browser = await chromium.launch();
  const page = await browser.newPage();

  await page.goto(‘https://example.com‘);
  await page.screenshot({ path: ‘example.png‘ });

  await browser.close();
})();

As you can see, the syntax is very similar between the two libraries. Playwright does offer a few more configuration options and conveniences, like a built-in page.waitForSelector() method to wait for elements before interacting with them.

Ultimately, the choice comes down to personal preference and any specific requirements for your projects. If you‘re already comfortable with Puppeteer‘s API and don‘t need multi-language or multi-browser support, it may be easier to stick with it. On the other hand, Playwright‘s cross-platform flexibility could be worth the learning curve if you work across different stacks.

Using Proxies for Web Scraping

Regardless of which headless browser you choose, you‘ll likely need proxies if you‘re scraping at any significant scale. Proxies allow you to mask your IP address and bypass rate limits or IP bans that can quickly derail your web scraping projects.

When choosing a proxy service for web scraping, look for:

• Large, diverse IP pool: Rotate through many different IP addresses to distribute requests and avoid blacklisting. Residential IPs from real devices are ideal.
• Geotargeting: Pick specific countries or cities for your proxies to fool anti-bot scripts and comply with regional restrictions.
• Concurrent connections: Send multiple requests at once to speed up scraping across many pages. Plans with unlimited bandwidth are great for large jobs.
• SOCKS5 protocol: SOCKS5 proxies can handle any TCP traffic (not just HTTP) and support both static and rotating IPs. They also add a layer of authentication for enhanced security.

We tested the top proxy services to see which ones work best with Playwright and Puppeteer in 2024. Our top picks are:

1. Bright Data: With over 72M residential IPs, unlimited bandwidth, and advanced location targeting, Bright Data is the gold standard for enterprise-grade web scraping. Their no-CAPTCHAs guarantee and 24/7 customer support justify the premium pricing.

2. IPRoyal: A reliable and ethical proxy provider with 2M+ residential IPs. Their user-friendly dashboard and flexible pricing make them a great choice for startups and independent developers. Fast in-house infrastructure and stellar support.

3. Proxy-Seller: Offers both shared and private proxies with worldwide coverage at competitive rates. Supports SOCKS5 and free IP/user agent rotation. Easy to integrate with scrapers and has responsive support.

Here‘s an example of how to configure Playwright with Bright Data proxies in Node.js:

// Set proxy options
const proxyOptions = {
  server: ‘http://zproxy.lum-superproxy.io:22225‘,
  username: ‘lum-customer-xxx-zone-xxx‘,
  password: ‘xxxxxxxxxxxx‘
};

// Launch browser with proxy
const browser = await chromium.launch({
  proxy: proxyOptions
});

For a cheaper option, Proxy-Seller‘s rotating proxies can be used like this:

const proxyOptions = {  
  server: ‘socks5://roi.proxyseller.com:20000‘,
  username: ‘ProxySeller.com-xxx‘,
  password: ‘xxxxxxxxxxxx‘
};

The setup is very similar in Puppeteer – just pass the proxyOptions object to puppeteer.launch(). Remember to keep your proxy credentials secure and never commit them to version control!

Performance and Scalability

When it comes to speed and efficiency, both Playwright and Puppeteer are pretty evenly matched in my experience. They leverage the same underlying browser engines (Chromium, Firefox, WebKit) which are heavily optimized for performance.

I ran some basic load tests to compare the resource usage and scraping speed of each library. Playwright came out slightly ahead on most benchmarks, but not by a significant margin:

Tested on a 4-core/8GB Digital Ocean droplet, scraping a mix of static and dynamic pages.

Of course, your mileage may vary depending on the specific websites, proxies, and configurations involved. In general, Playwright seems to have an edge for large-scale scraping thanks to its efficient multi-language bindings and newer browser engine optimizations.

Other factors like concurrency, caching, and intelligent retries can have a bigger impact on scraping performance than the choice of headless browser. Be sure to follow web scraping best practices like inspecting robots.txt, setting reasonable request rates, and handling errors gracefully to keep your scrapers running smoothly.

Conclusion

So which headless browser should you use for web scraping in 2024? As an expert who has used both extensively, here‘s my general advice:

• If cross-browser and cross-language support are important (e.g. comparing how a site renders in Chrome vs Firefox, or scraping in Python instead of Node.js), go with Playwright. Its multi-platform flexibility is a major advantage for QA workflows.

• If you‘re focused on Chrome and just need a battle-tested JavaScript library, Puppeteer is still a great choice with a larger community and more resources available. Its new "stealth" mode is also very handy for avoiding detection.

• For large-scale, production-grade scraping, I give the edge to Playwright for its superior performance and better tooling for monitoring and parallelization. But both libraries are plenty fast with proper configuration.

Ultimately, you can‘t go wrong with either Playwright or Puppeteer – they‘re both actively maintained by tech giants and cover all the essential features for modern web scraping. Your specific needs and preferences should guide the decision.

Whichever headless browser you choose, remember to use proxies to distribute your requests and stay compliant with website terms of service. Deploying your scrapers across multiple locations and IP addresses is essential for long-term success.

Disclaimer: The information provided is accurate to the best of my knowledge as of January 2024, but may change over time. Be sure to check the official documentation and latest releases for up-to-date details on Playwright and Puppeteer. Happy scraping!