May 5th, 2020
Mechanical Soup Vs. Proxies API

The world of web scraping is varied and complex, and Proxies API sits at one of the most crucial junctions. They are allowing web scrapers/crawlers to bypass IP blocks by using a single API endpoint to access our 20 million-plus high-speed proxies on rotation.

Example:

curl "http://api.proxiesapi.com/?auth_key=YOUR_KEY&url=URL"

One of the questions we get frequently is how we are different from services like OctoParse or Diffbot. Many times it is like comparing Apples and Oranges. Still, when we send this comparison table to our customer's developer team, their CXO, their marketing, or SEO team, they typically get it quite quickly if we are a convenient service or not.

So here is how we are different from Mechanical Soup.

Mechanical soup is a super simple library that helps you scrape, store and pass cookies, submit forms, etc. but it doesn't support Javascript rendering.

Here is an example of submitting a form and scraping the results on Duck Duck Go

import mechanicalsoup

# Connect to duckduckgo
browser = mechanicalsoup.StatefulBrowser()
browser.open("")

# Fill-in the search form
browser.select_form('#search_form_homepage')
browser["q"] = "MechanicalSoup"
browser.submit_selected()

# Display the results
for link in browser.page.select('a.result__a'):
    print(link.text, '->', link.attrs['href'])

Link here https://github.com/MechanicalSoup/MechanicalSoup

Mechanical Soup vs. Proxies API

AspectProxies APIMechanical Soup
Who is it for?DevelopersDevelopers
Cost1000 free CallsStarts at $49 pmOpen Source
API accessYesyes
Size of projectenterprisemediumsmallenterprisemediumsmall
Easy to setupsingle api call for everythingmanual setup
Product/Serviceproductproduct
Rotating ProxiesYesno
Single API?Yesno
Desktop Appnono
Visual Scrapingnono
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