Comparison
crawler.sh vs Playwright
Single-binary crawler with built-in orchestration vs a browser automation library you wire yourself.
Playwright is a browser automation library for testing and scraping. It gives you fine-grained control over headless Chrome but you write the crawl loop, the politeness logic, and the output formatting yourself. crawler.sh is a dedicated crawler: BFS traversal, robots.txt handling, and Markdown export are built in. Both can render JavaScript; crawler.sh does it without a separate Chrome process.
Side by side
Honest comparison on the axes that decide which tool fits your workflow.
Feature notes reflect publicly listed information at the time of writing.
When to pick which
Both tools solve real problems. Pick based on where the work actually runs and what you are billing against.
Pick Playwright when
You need to interact with pages (clicking, form filling, taking screenshots), you are building a test suite, or you want full programmatic control over a real browser for complex scraping logic.
Pick crawler.sh when
You want to crawl a whole site without writing a loop, you need SEO analysis and Markdown export built in, you want lower memory usage than headless Chrome, or you need a desktop app for non-engineers.
