Difference between Web Scraping and Web Crawling Last Updated : 12 Jul, 2025 Comments Improve Suggest changes 11 Likes Like Report 1. Web Scraping : Web Scraping is a technique used to extract a large amount of data from websites and then saving it to the local machine in the form of XML, excel or SQL. The tools used for web scraping are known as web scrapers. On the basis of the requirements given, they can extract the data from any website in a fraction of time. This automation of tasks is very helpful for developing data for machine learning and other purpose. They work in four steps: Sending the request to the target page.Getting response from the target page.Parsing and extracting the response.Download the data. Some of the popular web scraping tools are ProWebScraper, Webscraper.io, etc. 2. Web Crawling : Web Crawling is analogous to a spider crawling but the place of crawling here is the web!. It basically visits a website and read web pages for the purpose of building entries for search engine index. The tools that are used for web crawling are known as web crawlers or spiders. A series of web pages are analyzed and links to the pages on them are then followed for even more links thus it does a deep search for extracting of information. Famous search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing do web crawling and use this information for indexing web pages. Examples are Scrapy and Apache nut. Difference between Web Scraping and Web Crawling : S.NO.Web ScrapingWeb Crawling1.The tool used is Web Scraper.The tool used Web Crawler or Spiders.2.It is used for downloading informationIt is used for indexing of Web pages3.It need not visit all the pages of website for information.It visits each and every page, until the last line for information.4.A Web Scraper doesn't obey robots.txt in most of cases.Not all web crawlers obey robots.txt.5.It is done on both small and large scale.It is mostly employed in large scale.6.Application areas include Retail Marketing, Equity search, and Machine learning.Used in search engines to give search results to the user.7.Data de-duplication is not necessarily a part of Web Scraping.Data de-duplication is an integral part of Web Scraping.8.This needs crawl agent and a parser for parsing the response.This only needs only crawl agent.9.ProWebScraper, Web Scraper.io are the examplesGoogle, Yahoo or Bing do Web Crawling Create Quiz Comment N nishkarsh146 Follow 11 Improve N nishkarsh146 Follow 11 Improve Article Tags : Web Scraping Web Technologies - Difference Between Explore Python Web Scraping Tutorial 10 min read Introduction to Web ScrapingIntroduction to Web Scraping 5 min read What is Web Scraping and How to Use It? 7 min read Web Scraping - Legal or Illegal? 4 min read Difference between Web Scraping and Web Crawling 2 min read Web Scraping using cURL in PHP 2 min read Basics of Web ScrapingHTML Basics 7 min read Tags vs Elements vs Attributes in HTML 2 min read CSS Introduction 3 min read CSS Syntax 3 min read JavaScript Cheat Sheet - A Basic Guide to JavaScript 15+ min read Setting Up the EnvironmentInstalling BeautifulSoup: A Beginner's Guide 2 min read How to Install Requests in Python - For Windows, Linux, Mac 7 min read Selenium Python Introduction and Installation 2 min read How to Install Python Scrapy on Windows? 2 min read Extracting Data from Web PagesImplementing Web Scraping in Python with BeautifulSoup 6 min read How to extract paragraph from a website and save it as a text file? 2 min read Extract all the URLs from the webpage Using Python 2 min read How to Scrape Nested Tags using BeautifulSoup? 3 min read Extract all the URLs that are nested within <li> tags using BeautifulSoup 4 min read Clean Web Scraping Data Using clean-text in Python 2 min read Fetching Web PagesGET and POST Requests Using Python 7 min read BeautifulSoup - Scraping Paragraphs from HTML 3 min read HTTP Request MethodsGET method - Python requests 2 min read POST method - Python requests 2 min read PUT method - Python requests 2 min read DELETE method- Python requests 2 min read HEAD method - Python requests 2 min read PATCH method - Python requests 3 min read Searching and Extract for specific tags BeautifulsoupPython BeautifulSoup - find all class 2 min read BeautifulSoup - Search by text inside a tag 4 min read Scrape Google Search Results using Python BeautifulSoup 3 min read Get tag name using Beautifulsoup in Python 1 min read Extracting an attribute value with beautifulsoup in Python 2 min read BeautifulSoup - Modifying the tree 5 min read Find the text of the given tag using BeautifulSoup 2 min read Remove spaces from a string in Python 2 min read Understanding Character Encoding 6 min read XML parsing in Python 7 min read Python - XML to JSON 4 min read Scrapy BasicsScrapy - Command Line Tools 5 min read Scrapy - Item Loaders 15+ min read Scrapy - Item Pipeline 10 min read Scrapy - Selectors 7 min read Scrapy - Shell 9 min read Scrapy - Spiders 11 min read Scrapy - Feed exports 5 min read Scrapy - Link Extractors 5 min read Scrapy - Settings 7 min read Scrapy - Sending an E-mail 2 min read Scrapy - Exceptions 7 min read Selenium Python BasicsNavigating links using get method in Selenium - Python 2 min read Interacting with Webpage - Selenium Python 4 min read Locating single elements in Selenium Python 5 min read Locating multiple elements in Selenium Python 5 min read Locator Strategies - Selenium Python 2 min read Writing Tests using Selenium Python 2 min read Like