Web Scraping with Node.js: Cheerio, Puppeteer, and Playwright

Web Scraping with Node.js: Cheerio, Puppeteer, and Playwright Node.js has become a powerhouse for web scraping. This guide compares the three major tools — Cheerio, Puppeteer, and Playwright — with practical examples for each. When to Use What Tool Best For Speed JS Rendering Cheerio Static HTML parsing Fastest No Puppeteer Chrome automation Medium Yes Playwright Multi-browser testing Medium Yes Setup npm init -y npm install cheerio axios puppeteer playwright Cheerio: Fast HTML Parsing Cheerio is jQuery for the server. It parses static HTML without a browser. const axios = require ( " axios " ); const cheerio = require ( " cheerio " ); async function scrapeWithCheerio ( url ) { const { data } = await axios . get ( url , { headers : { " User-Agent " : " Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) " } }); const $ = cheerio . load ( data ); const results = []; $ ( " article.post " ). each (( i , el ) => { results . push ({ title : $ ( el ). find ( " h2 " ). text (). trim (), link : $ ( el )