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).find("a").attr("href"), summary: $(el).find(".summary").