Listly vs. Selenium
What is Selenium?
Selenium is an open-source automation tool, primarily used to test web applications. It allows developers with a framework for automating interactions with web browsers to simulate user interactions such as clicking buttons and navigating through web pages. It supports multiple browsers, from Google Chrome to Firefox to Safari to Edge, and complex interactions, including drag-and-drop and mouse movements using a set of APIs. With its flexibility and extensibility, it is also used for web scraping, data extraction, and web automation.
Why use Selenium for web scraping?
Above all, it is capable of handling dynamic content. Dynamic content is web content that changes depending on user interactions, including in-session behaviors, past purchases, and user demographics based on geo-locations — if you're already familiar with website personalization or recommendations, you've got the idea! Whereas traditional web scraping libraries struggle to parse dynamic content due to its complexity, Selenium can interact with web pages like a real user, rendering and processing Java-Script-generated content effectively and automating such interactions. For this reason, Selenium is often used for web scraping, even though it was originally designed for web application testing.
Listly vs. Selenium: What are the differences?
Selenium may give you more control and flexibility when dealing with highly dynamic websites that require interactions beyond simple HTML parsing, but you know, it comes with heavy coding. Learn more about how Listly’s efficient and user-friendly approach helps people, from freelancers to individual professionals to businesses, streamline their data collection workflows.
- Ease of use
- Performance
- Maintenance
- Pricing
Neat features that maximize Listly
Web browser extension
A browser extension is a powerful piece of software added to a web browser in just one click, which is much simpler to install. Since it requires minimal setup compared to configuring scripts or using external tools in Selenium, this convenience allows users to start scraping almost immediately. In addition, Listly’s extension is designed with a straightforward graphical user interface (GUI) like point-and-click buttons. It thus simplifies interaction and makes web scraping more accessible to users with different levels of technical expertise.
Listly for enterprises
Listly Enterprise is a custom B2B plan that allows enterprises to extract large-scale data with dedicated and exclusive server resources. Customize your workflows for web scraping, data extraction, and web automation — all with the power of Listly.
- Improve team productivity at an unlimited scale
- Collect enormous volumes of data with reliable dedicated servers
- Track the progress of web scraping tasks across teams