# Beautiful Soup

6 Hacker News commenters recommended Beautiful Soup and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Python library people reach for to parse and extract data from HTML, often alongside tools like Requests.

## Why people recommend it

- Go-to library for parsing HTML (3 comments): "Then HTML, another world of pain perfectly described in a Stack Overflow answer. Beautifulsoup." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47764301)) "Django, Pillow, Requests, BeautifulSoup, and pretty much every other library I use regularly" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46371709)) "parse it with BeautifulSoup or similar" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49467225))
- Makes HTML parsing easy (2 comments): "Then HTML, another world of pain perfectly described in a Stack Overflow answer. Beautifulsoup." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47764301)) "this library came along and made it easy" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355399))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Polars](https://hackerapproved.com/p/polars.md): 152 recommend
- [pandas](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pandas.md): 93 recommend
- [NumPy](https://hackerapproved.com/p/numpy.md): 86 recommend
- [SciPy](https://hackerapproved.com/p/scipy.md): 12 recommend
- [sh Python library](https://hackerapproved.com/p/sh.md): 10 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Beautiful Soup", https://hackerapproved.com/p/beautiful-soup/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).