Are you looking for the best alternative to your Cloudscraper web scraper?
We've got you covered!
While Cloudscraper is a popular tool for bypassing Cloudflare, its limitations, such as the inability to automate user interactions, low success rate, and more, are enough reasons to opt for an alternative.
This article outlines the pros and cons of Cloudscraper and lists the four best alternatives of the tool.
Let's go!
What Cloudscraper Does Well
Despite Cloudscraper's limitations, it has significant strengths that assured its popularity in the web scraping community. Let's discuss them below.
Easy to Use With Simple Setup
One of the upsides of Cloudscraper is that it's easy to get started with and use. Scraping with the library requires only a GET request to a target website and parsing its content with a tool like BeautifulSoup. If you're familiar with HTTP clients like the Requests library, using Cloudscraper is a piece of cake.
Effective for Basic Cloudflare Protection
Cloudscraper is a good choice for bypassing simple Cloudflare protections. Fortifying Cloudscraper only requires passing in extra configurations, such as delays, cookies, CAPTCHA bypass, and more, and it will handle basic anti-bot evasion under the hood.
Lightweight and Fast for Simple Scraping Tasks
Considering that Cloudscraper doesn't rely on browser instances, it's faster and more efficient than headless browsers. You can mimic actual users by spoofing certain browser behaviors without adding significant memory overhead to Cloudscraper.
Active Community and Support
Cloudscraper has moderately active community support with 4.2k GitHub stars and 106k weekly downloads. While less popular than tools like Requests, Cloudscraper enjoys decent mentions on developer forums like Stack Overflow, making it easy to solve related problems.
Cloudscraper Limitations
Cloudscraper is a powerful tool for bypassing anti-bot measures. However, it's often insufficient, especially when dealing with sophisticated anti-bot systems. Here are its significant limitations.
Limited JavaScript Execution
While Cloudscraper can spoof browsers like Chrome and Firefox, it doesn't fully control them like mainstream headless browsers like Selenium and Playwright. This limitation makes it impossible to execute JavaScript or automate user interactions like scrolling, hovering, typing, clicking, etc.
Difficulty Handling Complex Challenges
Complex Cloudflare challenges employ advanced detection techniques such as fingerprinting, machine learning, request header reputation, and more. Cloudscraper alone isn't enough to handle these defense mechanisms, as it only emulates a fraction of the browser environment, potentially exposing bot-like attributes elsewhere.
Inconsistent Success Rates
Cloudscraper's inability to bypass advanced Cloudflare security measures introduces uncertainty to your scraping results, making the library unreliable, particularly when scraping multiple pages. With such inconsistency, you can't predict which pages will succeed or fail during scraping.Â
Below, we've listed a few Cloudscraper alternatives that offer better performance and overcome these limitations.
Cloudscraper Alternatives
To mitigate Cloudscraper's limitations, here are the best 4 alternatives you can use.
1. ZenRows
ZenRows is a web scraping API with a complete toolset required to scrape any website without getting blocked. It's easy to use, efficient, and has a high success rate, requiring only a single API call in any programming language. ZenRows features proxy auto-rotation, request header optimization, anti-CAPTCHA and anti-bot auto bypass, and more.
With ZenRows, you don't need to rely on Cloudscraper or a headless browser, as the tool allows you to automate user interactions and scrape dynamic content easily, regardless of the website's security level. It even offers a dedicated residential proxy service under the same price cap, allowing you to access geographically locked content and avoid IP bans.
Let's use ZenRows to access a Cloudflare-protected website like the G2 Reviews to see how it works.
Sign up to open the Request Builder. Paste the target URL in the link box, activate Premium Proxies and JS Rendering, select Python as your programming language, and choose the API connection mode. Copy and paste the generated code into your Python script.
Here's the generated code:
# pip3 install requests
import requests
url = "https://www.g2.com/products/asana/reviews"
apikey = "<YOUR_ZENROWS_API_KEY>"
params = {
"url": url,
"apikey": apikey,
"js_render": "true",
"premium_proxy": "true",
}
response = requests.get("https://api.zenrows.com/v1/", params=params)
print(response.text)
The above code gives the protected website's full-page HTML, proving that your scraper bypasses Cloudflare protection:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<link href="https://www.g2.com/images/favicon.ico" rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon" />
<title>Asana Reviews, Pros + Cons, and Top Rated Features</title>
<!-- ... -->
</head>
<body>
<!-- other content omitted for brevity -->
</body>
You just bypassed the highest Cloudflare security level with ZenRows. Forget about getting blocked!Â
Read on to learn about other Cloudscraper alternatives.
2. Playwright
Playwright is a browser automation library used for web scraping. It allows full-scale browser control to automate user interactions, including clicking, hovering, scrolling, and more, making it more stable and efficient than Cloudscraper. Playwright supports Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge and features a command line tool for installing WebDrivers.
With 64.9k GitHub stars, 103k weekly downloads, and significant mentions on websites like Stack Overflow, Playwright has a more active user community than Cloudscraper. Playwright supports several programming languages, including Python, JavaScript, .NET, and Java. By default, Playwright lacks anti-bot bypass capabilities. However, you can enhance it with a plugin such as Playwright Stealth.
To use Playwright with Python, install it with pip and download its WebDrivers:
pip3 install playwright
playwright install
Below is a simple Playwright scraper that visits the JavaScript challenge page and prints its HTML. We'll use this website as a demo for the other tools.
# pip3 install playwright
from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright
# start Playwright
with sync_playwright() as p:
# launch a browser instance (Chromium in this case)
browser = p.chromium.launch(headless=True)
# create a new page
page = browser.new_page()
# navigate to the target website
page.goto("https://www.scrapingcourse.com/javascript-rendering")
# wait for the page to load fully
page.wait_for_load_state("domcontentloaded")
# get the HTML content of the page
html = page.content()
# print the HTML content
print(html)
# close the browser
browser.close()
3. Selenium
Selenium is one of the most popular browser automation libraries for web scraping. With 30k GitHub stars, 4M weekly downloads, and many solutions on platforms like Stack Overflow, it has better community support than Cloudscraper, and you can solve related problems quickly.
Like Playwright, Selenium lets you control Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari, allowing you to mimic user interactions and extract dynamic content. It covers more programming languages, including Python, Perl, Ruby, PHP, JavaScript, Java, C#, and .NET. Although Selenium doesn't have built-in anti-bot bypass tools, it has plugins to increase its chances of evading detection, including Selenium Stealth and Undetected ChromeDriver.
To use Selenium with Python, install the following libraries using pip:
pip3 install selenium webdriver-manager
Here's a basic Selenium scraper that visits the target website and prints its page source:
# pip3 install selenium webdriver-manager
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.chrome.service import Service
from webdriver_manager.chrome import ChromeDriverManager
import time
# set up Chrome options
options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
# run Chrome in headless mode
options.add_argument("--headless=new")
# install ChromeDriver and set up the driver instance
driver = webdriver.Chrome(
options=options, service=Service(ChromeDriverManager().install())
)
# visit the target web page
driver.get("https://www.scrapingcourse.com/javascript-rendering")
# pause to load the full page
time.sleep(5)
# print the page source
print(driver.page_source)
# quit the browser
driver.quit()
Read our complete tutorial on Python Selenium web scraping to learn more.
4. Puppeteer
Puppeteer is a headless browser library in JavaScript with high-level API to control Chrome and Firefox. Like the other Cloudscraper alternatives listed here, it lets you execute JavaScript and automate user interactions, making it more efficient than Cloudscraper. It's popular with 88k GitHub stars, 3.6M weekly downloads, and an active community on developer forums like Stack Overflow.
Although Puppeteer is primarily available in JavaScript, it has a Python port called Pyppeteer, allowing you to use its functionalities in Python. Puppeteer also has evasion plugins, such as Puppeteer Stealth, to boost its anti-bot bypass capabilities.
To use Puppeteer in Python, we'll use its Python port, Pyppeteer. Install it using pip:
pip3 install pyppeteer
Below is a basic Pyppeteer scraper that runs asynchronously with Python's asyncio library:
# pip3 install pyppeteer
import asyncio
from pyppeteer import launch
# start an asynchronous function
async def scraper():
# launch the browser instance (headless=True to run without GUI)
browser = await launch(headless=True)
# start a new page
page = await browser.newPage()
# visit the target web page
await page.goto(
"https://www.scrapingcourse.com/javascript-rendering",
{"waitUntil": "networkidle2"},
)
# print the page source
html = await page.content()
print(html)
# close the browser
await browser.close()
# run the async function
asyncio.run(scraper())
Want to learn more about Puppeteer? Read our detailed article on Puppeteer web scraping.
Conclusion
You've explored the upsides and limitations of Cloudscraper and reviewed the top 4 alternative tools that can mitigate some of Cloudscraper's drawbacks.
However, while Cloudscraper and its free alternatives, including Playwright, Selenium, and Puppeteer, may bypass simple anti-bot measures, they don't guarantee all-time success. We recommend using a web scraping API like ZenRows to scrape any website reliably at scale, regardless of its protection level.
Try ZenRows for free now without a credit card!