What are the best alternatives to Selenium for web scraping?

Browser automation options

Tool

Pros

Cons

Playwright

Fast, modern API

Requires infrastructure management

Puppeteer

Strong ecosystem

Chrome-only

Selenium

Broad browser support

Slow, resource-heavy

Why use APIs instead

All browser automation tools require you to manage infrastructure, scaling, and anti-detection logic yourself. Scraping APIs handle all of this server-side.

Olostep renders JavaScript, handles pagination, and returns clean, LLM-ready outputs via API. Olostep Actions support clicks and navigation without any browser setup on your end.

Key Takeaways

For most scraping tasks, managed APIs are simpler and more reliable than Selenium. Reserve browser automation for genuinely complex interactions that an API can't handle.