Web Scraping with Python: requests vs Playwright vs Scrapy — Which Should You Use?

Every Python web scraping tutorial starts with a different tool. Some use requests , others jump straight to Scrapy, and newer ones reach for Playwright. They're all valid — but they solve different problems. I've used all three extensively. Here's when each one makes sense, where each one falls apart, and how to pick the right tool without over-engineering your project. Quick Comparison Feature requests + BS4 Playwright Scrapy Learning curve Easy Medium Steep JavaScript support No Yes No (without plugins) Speed Fast Slow Very fast Memory usage Low High Medium Built-in concurrency No No Yes Best for Simple pages SPAs, interactive sites Large-scale crawling Option 1: requests + BeautifulSoup This is where everyone should start. It's the simplest approach and handles more sites than you'd expect. import requests from bs4 import BeautifulSoup def scrape_articles ( url ): headers = { " User-Agent " : " Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) Chrome/131.0.0.0 " } response = requests . get