trafilatura vs newspaper
Python web content extraction tools compared
trafilatura and newspaper are Python projects for extracting readable content and metadata from web pages. trafilatura covers general web discovery and structured exports, while newspaper focuses on collecting and analyzing articles from known news publications.
trafilatura: Extract Text and Metadata from Web Pages
Trafilatura is a Python library and CLI for discovering web content and extracting readable text and metadata from HTML. It suits developers and researchers building crawlers, web corpora, or content-processing pipelines that need structured output.
newspaper: Extract News Articles and Metadata in Python
Newspaper3k is a Python library for crawling news sites and extracting article text, metadata, images, keywords, and summaries. It suits developers building news aggregation, monitoring, or text-processing workflows.
| trafilatura | newspaper | |
|---|---|---|
| Language | Python | Python |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Stars | 6.9k | 15.2k |
| Forks | 447 | 2.1k |
| Last analyzed | Oct 3, 2026 | Oct 3, 2026 |
Key differences
- trafilatura discovers URLs from sitemaps and feeds, while newspaper builds publication crawls to find article and category URLs.
- trafilatura extracts structured text such as headings, lists, and code, and exports to formats including Markdown, JSON, and XML-TEI; newspaper extracts article text and offers keywords and summaries.
- trafilatura supports live URLs, local HTML files, and parsed HTML trees; newspaper can download articles or process HTML provided by an application.
- trafilatura uses Apache-2.0, while newspaper uses MIT.
- trafilatura is suited to web corpora and general content pipelines; newspaper is oriented toward news aggregation, monitoring, and article analysis.
- Both projects use Python; newspaper supports multiple languages, including English, Chinese, German, and Arabic.
Choose trafilatura if you…
- need to discover web content through sitemaps or feeds and extract structured records.
- want multiple export formats or support for local HTML and parsed HTML trees.
- are building corpora or general web-content processing pipelines.
Choose newspaper if you…
- need to crawl known news publications for article and category URLs.
- want article-focused features such as images, keywords, and summaries.
- need a Python library with support for multiple languages.
Compare the numbers side by side, or add more projects
This comparison is generated with AI from the OSRepos analyses of both projects. Always check each project's repository and documentation before choosing.