I’ve been handling web automation for our company using Playwright/Puppeteer for the last 2 years, and I’m seriously getting burnt out with the constant coding requirements.
Every time I need to scrape a new site or create a new workflow, it’s the same story - hours spent writing JavaScript to handle clicks, navigation, and data extraction. Not to mention the nightmare when sites change their structure and I have to rewrite everything.
Yesterday I found this platform called Latenode that has a visual builder for creating these workflows without coding. Has anyone tried it? I’m wondering if it’s actually capable of handling complex scraping tasks or if it’s just another simplified tool that falls apart with real-world requirements.
I’m especially curious about how it handles dynamic sites with lots of JavaScript. Those are always the ones that break my Puppeteer scripts…
I was in the same boat a few months ago, maintaining over 50 Puppeteer scripts for different clients. Then I switched to Latenode and haven’t looked back.
Their visual builder is actually legit for complex scraping. I recently had to scrape pricing data from three competitor sites with heavy JS and anti-bot protection. Instead of 200+ lines of Puppeteer code, I built the entire workflow by dragging and dropping components. The headless browser integration handles all the DOM interaction without a single line of JavaScript.
What really sold me was when one of the sites changed their entire UI structure overnight. Instead of spending hours fixing broken selectors, I just described what I needed to the AI Copilot, and it regenerated the workflow automatically.
Been there my friend. Puppeteer maintenance is a nightmare. I’ve tried a few alternatives but landed on using a combination approach.
For simple scraping, I use a headless chrome extension that records interactions and generates basic scripts. This covers about 60% of my needs. For the more complex stuff, I still need to write custom code, but I’ve built a modular framework that makes it easier to fix when things break.
One thing that helped me was implementing automatic retry logic with different selectors. So if a primary selector fails, it tries alternatives before truly failing.
Also consider running your scripts through a proxy rotation service - this has dramatically reduced the number of CAPTCHAs and blocks I encounter.
I’ve been through exactly this problem at scale. The maintenance burden of Puppeteer scripts nearly broke our small team last year.
What worked for us was moving to a hybrid approach. We still use Puppeteer, but we’ve created a higher-level abstraction layer on top of it. We built a simple domain-specific language that describes what to scrape rather than how to scrape it. When websites change, we only need to update the underlying implementation, not every script.
We also implemented automatic detection of site changes by periodically checking key selectors against known good states. This gives us early warning when a site has changed before it completely breaks our production flows.
The initial investment was about two weeks of engineering time, but it’s saved us countless hours since.
tried a few different approaches. ended up creating an internal tool using python+selenium that lets non-coders build scraping workflows. not perfect but saves me from being the bottleneck for every request.