Botasaurus

Botasaurus is an open-source Python framework built by Omkar Cloud (Chetan Jain IT Solutions) for creating robust, undetectable web scrapers. It is available on GitHub under the MIT License with over 5,300 stars and 469 forks as of mid-2026. The framework consolidates anti-detection, parallelization, caching, UI generation, and desktop app packaging into a single toolkit.

What It Is

Botasaurus is a "Swiss Army knife" for web scraping and browser automation. It provides three core decorators — @browser, @request, and @task — that wrap scraping logic with configurable anti-detection, proxy rotation, parallel execution, caching, and output handling. Beyond raw scraping, it can turn any Python scraper into a web UI, a REST API, or a cross-platform desktop application.

Anti-Detection Architecture

The framework's primary differentiator is its approach to evading bot detection systems. According to the project README, Botasaurus can bypass:

• Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF)
• BrowserScan Bot Detection
• Fingerprint Bot Detection
• Datadome Bot Detection
• Cloudflare Turnstile CAPTCHA

Key techniques include visiting pages via Google referrer (driver.google_get), human-like mouse movements via a built-in human mode (driver.enable_human_mode()), SSL-authenticated proxy support that avoids the non-SSL fingerprinting pitfall common in seleniumwire-based setups, and a bypass_cloudflare=True flag for JS-challenge pages. The framework deliberately avoids changing browser fingerprints by default, since fingerprint mismatches are themselves a detection signal.

Decorator-Driven Workflow

Developers configure scrapers almost entirely through decorator arguments rather than boilerplate code:

• @browser: Launches a humane Chrome driver; supports proxy, profile, tiny_profile, headless, block_images, block_images_and_css, reuse_driver, parallel, cache, max_retry, async_queue, and Chrome extension injection.
• @request: Makes browser-like HTTP requests using botasaurus-requests (based on hrequests), with correct cipher suites, header ordering, and Google referrer by default.
• @task: Wraps any Python function (including third-party Playwright/Selenium calls or non-scraping tasks like video conversion) with the same parallelization and caching infrastructure.

The parallel option launches multiple browser or request instances simultaneously. The cache option persists results to disk so re-runs skip already-scraped items. The async_queue option enables concurrent browser scrolling and background HTTP requests — the README demonstrates this with a Google Maps scraper that scrolls a feed while simultaneously fetching place details.

UI, API, and Desktop Packaging

Botasaurus goes beyond scripting by offering three deployment surfaces:

• Web UI scraper: Register a scraper with Server.add_scraper() and define input controls in a JavaScript file. The framework generates a full frontend with task management, data tables, sorting, filtering, and JSON/Excel/CSV export. A REST API with auto-generated documentation is included.
• Desktop Extractor: Build a standalone Windows/macOS/Linux application in approximately one day using JavaScript. The desktop app includes task management, data tables, export, sorting, filtering, and caching — with zero cloud infrastructure costs.
• Gitpod / Docker / VM deployment: The starter template ships with Dockerfile, Docker Compose, and VM install scripts targeting Google Cloud. A bota install-scraper CLI command automates VM setup.

Utilities and Developer Experience

The framework ships a broad set of scraping utilities:

• bt: Read/write JSON, Excel, CSV, and HTML files; data cleaning helpers; S3 upload; zip packaging.
• Sitemap: Fetch and filter links from XML sitemaps (including .gz compressed), with built-in caching and refresh support.
• Links: Filter and extract links from arbitrary lists using the same filter/extractor API as Sitemap.
• Cache: Programmatic cache management — put, get, has, remove, clear, count, filter cached/uncached items, and delete by filter function.
• LocalStorage: Persistent key-value store between scraper runs.
• IPUtils: Retrieve current IP, country, region, ISP, and coordinates.
• soupify: Create BeautifulSoup objects from a Driver, Request response, Driver Element, or raw HTML string.
• Debug support: On exception in browser mode, the framework beeps and pauses the browser at the crash point rather than closing it.

Current Status

The repository was last pushed on June 29, 2026, and last updated July 1, 2026, indicating active maintenance. The project is licensed MIT and sponsored by what the project page describes as "1000+ people on GitHub." The GitHub topics include undetected-chromedriver, bypass-cloudflare, scraping-framework, and anti-detect-browser, reflecting its positioning as a detection-bypass-first framework. The recommended upgrade path for detection issues is to run pip install --upgrade bota botasaurus botasaurus-api botasaurus-requests botasaurus-driver botasaurus-proxy-authentication botasaurus-server botasaurus-humancursor, suggesting a modular multi-package architecture under active development.