Supacrawler vs Playwright

Playwright is Microsoft's browser automation framework, designed for testing and browser automation. We benchmarked it against Supacrawler for JavaScript-heavy web scraping tasks.

Key Differences

Playwright excels at browser automation and testing but has significant overhead for scraping. Supacrawler is purpose-built for high-performance data extraction with Go-based streaming architecture using Playwright as its rendering engine.

Test Environment: Mac M4, 24GB RAM, Python 3.11, JavaScript rendering enabled (render_js=True), identical retry logic (3 retries, exponential backoff), 30s timeouts, networkidle wait state.

Performance Benchmarks

Single Page Performance (https://example.com with JavaScript):

Supacrawler is 6.3x faster despite using Playwright internally for rendering.

Multi-Page Crawling Performance:

Large-Scale Testing (50 pages per site):

Technical Architecture Comparison

Playwright Python Async:

# Async but still sequential bottleneck
for url in urls:
    async with semaphore:
        page = await context.new_page()
        await page.goto(url)  # Block until complete
        # Process sequentially

Supacrawler Go Streaming:

// True concurrent processing with goroutines
maxWorkers := 2  // Optimized for JavaScript workloads
for i := 0; i < maxWorkers; i++ {
    go worker()  // Parallel processing
}
// Stream results as they complete

Performance Advantages:

• Go Concurrency: True goroutines vs Python asyncio (GIL-limited)
• Streaming Architecture: Real-time results vs batch processing
• Browser Pool Management: Optimized cloud browsers vs local overhead
• Network Optimization: Go's efficient network stack vs WebDriver protocol

The Content Quality Trade-off

Playwright Raw Output:

Supabase | The Postgres Development Platform.Product Developers 
Solutions PricingDocsBlog88.3KSign inStart your project...

Supacrawler LLM-Ready Output:

# Build in a weekend, Scale to millions

Supabase is the Postgres development platform.

Start your project with a Postgres database, Authentication...

Supacrawler automatically removes navigation, ads, and boilerplate while preserving structured content - faster than Playwright while delivering higher data quality.

Why the Performance Gap is So Large

The dramatic performance difference (up to 78.6x faster) comes from:

1. Browser Infrastructure: Cloud-optimized browser pools vs local browser management
2. Concurrency Model: Go goroutines vs Python asyncio limitations
3. Network Stack: Optimized scraping pipeline vs general automation framework
4. Resource Management: Purpose-built for scraping vs general browser automation

Use Cases

Setup Complexity

Playwright Setup:

1. Install Playwright
2. Download browser binaries (1.5GB+)
3. Configure async/await patterns
4. Handle browser lifecycle
5. Implement retry logic
6. Scale infrastructure

Supacrawler Setup:

1. Get API key
2. pip install supacrawler
3. Start scraping

Getting Started

Playwright: Install 1.5GB+ browsers → Configure async patterns → Handle browser management → Write retry logic → Scale infrastructure

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

See detailed benchmarks: Supacrawler vs Playwright Performance Analysis