Selenium versus BeautifulSoup for web scraping

Question

I'm scraping content from a website using Python. First I used BeautifulSoup and Mechanize on Python but I saw that the website had a button that created content via JavaScript so I decided to use Selenium.

Given that I can find elements and get their content using Selenium with methods like driver.find_element_by_xpath, what reason is there to use BeautifulSoup when I could just use Selenium for everything?

And in this particular case, I need to use Selenium to click on the JavaScript button so is it better to use Selenium to parse as well or should I use both Selenium and Beautiful Soup?

Answer 1

	Beautiful Soup	Selenium
Extensibilty	You can use Beautiful Soup when it comes to a small project, Or low-level complex project Beautiful Soup can do the task pretty amazing as it helps us to maintain our code simple and flexible. If you are a beginner and if you want to learn things quickly and want to perform web scraping operations then go for Beautiful Soup.	When you are dealing with Core Javascript featured website then Selenium would be the best choice. but the Data size should be limited.
Performance	Beautiful Soup: Beautiful Soup is pretty slow to perform a certain task but we can overcome this issue with the help of Multithreading concept but However the programmer need to know the concept of multithreading very effectively. This is the downside of Beautiful Soup.	It can handle up to some range butn’t equivalent to Scrapy.
Ecosystem	BeautifulSoup: This library has a lot of dependencies in the ecosystem. This is one of the downsides of this library for a complex project.	It has a good ecosystem for the development but the problem is we can’t utilize the proxies very easily.

Hope this helps!