🥇 1. Selenium

🔹 What it is: A browser automation tool (controls Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc.)
🔹 Use Case: Web scraping, testing web apps, automating clicks/forms/navigation
🔹 Strengths:

• Can handle JavaScript-heavy websites (dynamic pages).

• Simulates real user actions (click, scroll, input).

• Works with multiple languages (Python, Java, C#, etc.).
  🔹 Weaknesses:

• Slower than BS/Playwright because it launches a real browser.

• Can be easily detected by anti-bot systems.

✅ Best for: Web automation + scraping dynamic sites

🥈 2. BeautifulSoup

🔹 What it is: A Python library for parsing and extracting data from HTML/XML.
🔹 Use Case: Data extraction from static pages or after you already fetched HTML with requests.
🔹 Strengths:

• Very lightweight and fast.

• Super easy to learn & use.

• Works great for clean HTML parsing.
  🔹 Weaknesses:

• Cannot handle JavaScript-rendered content on its own.

• Needs other tools (like requests, selenium, or playwright) to fetch dynamic content.

✅ Best for: Parsing clean static HTML

🥉 3. Playwright

🔹 What it is: A modern automation library (by Microsoft) for web browsers.
🔹 Use Case: Web scraping, testing, and automation (like Selenium but newer and faster).
🔹 Strengths:

• Handles JavaScript-heavy websites easily.

• Much faster than Selenium (headless browser mode).

• Built-in features: auto-waiting, multiple browser contexts, capturing screenshots, etc.

• Can bypass some anti-bot protections better than Selenium.
  🔹 Weaknesses:

• Slightly newer, smaller community than Selenium.

• Slightly heavier setup compared to BeautifulSoup.

✅ Best for: Fast & robust scraping of dynamic sites

⚡ Quick Comparison Table

🎯 When to Use What?

• 👉 Use BeautifulSoup if the site is static and you just need to parse HTML.

• 👉 Use Selenium if you need browser automation + scraping.

• 👉 Use Playwright if you need speed & dynamic scraping with modern sites.