When should I use Axios vs Puppeteer for web scraping?

The choice between Axios and Puppeteer depends on whether the target website uses JavaScript to render content.

Use Axios + Cheerio when:

• The site content is in the initial HTML response (view page source shows the data you need)
• The site is mostly static with server-side rendering
• You need fast, lightweight scraping
• You're scraping many pages and want minimal resource usage
• The site doesn't have aggressive anti-bot measures
• You only need to make HTTP requests without browser simulation

Advantages:

• 10-100x faster than Puppeteer
• Uses minimal memory (MBs vs GBs)
• Easier to deploy and scale
• Simpler code for straightforward scraping
• Less likely to be detected as automated

Use Puppeteer (or Playwright) when:

• Data is loaded via JavaScript/AJAX after page load (view page source doesn't show the data)
• The site is a single-page application (React, Vue, Angular)
• You need to interact with the page (click buttons, fill forms, scroll)
• The site uses anti-bot techniques that detect non-browser requests
• You need to take screenshots or generate PDFs
• You need to handle complex authentication flows
• You need to wait for specific elements to appear

Advantages:

• Executes JavaScript like a real browser
• Handles dynamic content automatically
• Can simulate user behavior
• Bypasses some anti-bot measures
• Can access data that's never in HTML (rendered from JavaScript objects)

Hybrid approach:

• Start with Axios+Cheerio for speed
• Fall back to Puppeteer for specific pages that don't return data
• Use Puppeteer to get initial cookies/tokens then use Axios for subsequent requests
• Run Puppeteer for critical paths and Axios for bulk data

Resource considerations:

• Puppeteer uses ~100-500MB per browser instance and requires a full Chrome installation
• Axios uses <10MB per instance
• For scraping 10,000 pages, Axios might finish in minutes while Puppeteer could take hours

Detection considerations:

• Axios requests are easily identifiable as automated unless you carefully craft headers
• Puppeteer can be detected through browser fingerprinting but is generally stealthier