I identified ten leading self-hosted web-scraping and browser-automation frameworks, spanning headless-browser drivers, high-level crawlers, and API-first services. Only Firecrawl offers built-in Markdown output, converting scraped pages directly into clean Markdown; all others require either custom pipelines or external libraries (e.g. Turndown) to transform HTML/text into Markdown. Here’s a quick rundown:

- **Firecrawl** (Node, Python, Go SDKs): API-first scraper with native Markdown output and AI-powered extraction citeturn0search0turn0search11  
- **Playwright** (TS/JS, Python, C#, Java): Cross-browser headless automation; no native Markdown conversion citeturn1search0turn1search12  
- **Puppeteer** (JS/TS): Headless Chrome/Firefox control; requires manual Markdown transformation citeturn5search0  
- **Scrapy** (Python): Asynchronous HTTP crawler; extensible pipelines but no built-in Markdown citeturn6search0  
- **Apify SDK** (JS/TS): Scalable crawler on Puppeteer; rich API but no Markdown output citeturn7search1  
- **Selenium** (Java, Python, C#, Ruby, JS): WebDriver automation; generic browser control, no Markdown citeturn8search0  
- **Headless Chrome Crawler** (JS/TS): Promise-based crawler on Puppeteer; CSV/JSON out, no Markdown citeturn4search0  
- **Colly** (Go): Fast HTTP scraper; supports robots.txt and parallelism, no Markdown citeturn2search0  
- **simplecrawler** (JS): Event-driven Node crawler; basic link discovery, no Markdown citeturn3search0  
- **MechanicalSoup** (Python): Requests+BeautifulSoup for form-based sites; no JS support or Markdown citeturn9search0  

## Self-Hosted Scraping Tools and Links

| Tool                      | GitHub Link                                                          |
|---------------------------|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
| **Firecrawl**             | https://github.com/mendableai/firecrawl-mcp-server citeturn0search8 |
| **Playwright**            | https://github.com/microsoft/playwright citeturn1search0       |
| **Puppeteer**             | https://github.com/puppeteer/puppeteer citeturn5search0      |
| **Scrapy**                | https://github.com/scrapy/scrapy citeturn6search0            |
| **Apify SDK**             | https://github.com/apify/apify-sdk-js citeturn7search5       |
| **Selenium**              | https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium citeturn8search0      |
| **Headless Chrome Crawler** | https://github.com/yujiosaka/headless-chrome-crawler citeturn4search0 |
| **Colly**                 | https://github.com/gocolly/colly citeturn2search0            |
| **simplecrawler**         | https://github.com/simplecrawler/simplecrawler citeturn3search0  |
| **MechanicalSoup**        | https://github.com/MechanicalSoup/MechanicalSoup citeturn9search0 |

## Feature Comparison

| Feature                   | Firecrawl            | Playwright              | Puppeteer           | Scrapy          | Apify SDK        | Selenium       | HCCrawler         | Colly             | simplecrawler    | MechanicalSoup   |
|---------------------------|----------------------|-------------------------|---------------------|-----------------|------------------|----------------|-------------------|-------------------|------------------|------------------|
| **Headless Browser**      | ✓                    | ✓                       | ✓                   | ✕               | ✓                | ✓              | ✓                 | ✕                 | ✕                | ✕                |
| **JS-Rendered Content**   | ✓                    | ✓                       | ✓                   | ✕               | ✓                | ✓              | ✓                 | ✕                 | ✕                | ✕                |
| **Async/Parallel**        | API rate limits      | ✔️                       | ✔️                  | ✔️              | ✔️               | ✔️             | ✔️                | ✔️                | ✔️               | ✕                |
| **Native Markdown**       | ✔️ citeturn0search11 | ✕                       | ✕                   | ✕               | ✕                | ✕              | ✕                 | ✕                 | ✕                | ✕                |
| **Language**              | Node/Python/Go       | TypeScript/JS, Python…  | JS/TS               | Python          | JS/TS            | Java, Python… | JavaScript        | Go                | JavaScript       | Python           |
| **Community & Maintenance** | Medium (2.7k⭐)     | Very High (71.8k⭐)      | Very High (90.5k⭐)  | Very High (54.9k⭐) | High (17.5k⭐)   | Very High (32.1k⭐) | Medium (3.3k⭐) | High (24.1k⭐)    | Medium (2.1k⭐) | Medium (4.7k⭐)  |

_Table sources: respective GitHub repositories and docs._

## Trade-Offs and Recommendations

- **If you need out-of-the-box Markdown**: Firecrawl is unique in shipping clean Markdown directly—ideal for LLM pipelines or static-site generation citeturn0search11.  
- **For pure browser automation**: Playwright or Puppeteer offer the most robust cross-browser support and ecosystem integration citeturn1search0turn5search0.  
- **For large-scale Python crawling**: Scrapy remains the go-to for high-throughput, asynchronous scraping with rich extensions citeturn6search0.  
- **Lightweight, language-specific needs**: Colly (Go) and MechanicalSoup (Python) are excellent for simpler tasks where JS rendering isn’t required citeturn2search0turn9search0.  

### Alternative Approaches

- **Custom Markdown pipelines**: Combine any headless tool (Playwright/Puppeteer) with Turndown or Python’s markdownify to post-process HTML.  
- **Hybrid setups**: Use Scrapy for link management + Playwright for page rendering, stitching results via a shared queue.  
- **Serverless deployments**: Deploy lightweight crawlers (Colly, simplecrawler) in containers or AWS Lambda for burst-scale jobs.  

What’s your primary focus—maximizing Markdown-ready output, pure rendering fidelity, or raw scraping throughput? Which of these trade-offs align best with your project’s long-term automation and maintenance goals?