Supacrawler vs BeautifulSoup

BeautifulSoup is a Python library for parsing HTML and XML documents. It's excellent for static content but has significant limitations for modern web scraping.

Key Differences

BeautifulSoup excels at parsing static HTML with minimal overhead, but requires manual setup for production use. Supacrawler is purpose-built for LLM applications with automatic content cleaning and JavaScript support.

Test Environment: Mac M4, 24GB RAM, Python 3.11, identical retry logic (3 retries, exponential backoff), 10s timeouts.

Performance Benchmarks

Single Page Performance (https://supabase.com):

Supacrawler is faster and delivers production-ready data. Note that this result is more variant since this is a non chromium-launched page, more information below.

Multi-Page Crawling (50 pages per site):

JavaScript Content Support:

The Content Quality Trade-off

BeautifulSoup Raw Output:

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Supacrawler LLM-Ready Output:

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Supacrawler automatically removes navigation, ads, and boilerplate while preserving structured content in clean markdown format.

Use Cases

Getting Started

BeautifulSoup: Install library → Write retry logic → Handle errors → Clean content manually → Scale infrastructure

Supacrawler: Get API key → pip install supacrawler → Start scraping clean data immediately

See detailed benchmarks: Supacrawler vs BeautifulSoup Performance Analysis