BeautifulSoup Vs Selenium
Welcome back! BeautifulSoup and Selenium are both very popular options for web scraping with Python (and some other languages as well), so let’s talk about some pros and cons for both of these packages, lets’ just jump into it!
Installation
Installing these packages is fairly similar, using the pip command within Python, installing BeautifulSoup is like this:
pip install bs4
#OR
pip3 install bs4Installing Selenium is like this:
pip install selenium
#OR
pip3 install seleniumThe Basics
Starting off, at their core they essentially do the same thing, they scrape data from websites but there are a few key differences between them. In my experience, Beautiful Soup does a great job at scraping data from these websites but Selenium has a ton of features up it’s sleeve making it a more robust tool (in my opinion). What do I mean by this? Well lets take a look at some examples i’ve done before:
In this article that I wrote a few months ago, I talk about the process of pulling data from Google Trends:
