Web Scraping vs API: When to Use Each (With Examples)

You're building a data-driven application and need to pull information from external sources. Should you scrape or use an API ? Both extract data, but they differ fundamentally in reliability, legality, and ease of use. Key Differences Feature Web Scraping API Data Source HTML/XML pages Structured endpoints Reliability Unstable (layout changes) Stable Speed Slower (parsing) Faster (direct) Legal Risk Higher Lower When to Use Web Scraping No official API exists You need unstructured data (prices, text, images) The site is public and allows scraping (check robots.txt ) Example: Scrape Product Prices import requests from bs4 import BeautifulSoup url = ' https://example-shop.com/products ' response = requests . get ( url ) soup = BeautifulSoup ( response . text , ' html.parser ' ) for product in soup . find_all ( ' div ' , class_ = ' product-card ' ): name = product . find ( ' h2 ' ). text . strip () price = product . find ( ' span ' , class_ = ' price ' ). text . strip () print ( f ' { na