Beautiful Soup
Shares rank 11 of 14 Python libraries by recommenders
Python library people reach for to parse and extract data from HTML, often alongside tools like Requests.
Python library people reach for to parse and extract data from HTML, often alongside tools like Requests.
6 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 6
- criticize it
- 0
- approval share
- 100%
Recommended in 5 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 6 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- Nobody criticizes itNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 5 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Go-to library for parsing HTML
“Then HTML, another world of pain perfectly described in a Stack Overflow answer. Beautifulsoup.”
Comment from 14 Apr 2026 in “Someone Bought 30 WordPress Plugins and Planted a Backdoor in All of Them” “Django, Pillow, Requests, BeautifulSoup, and pretty much every other library I use regularly”
Comment from 24 Dec 2025 in “Deprecate like you mean it” “parse it with BeautifulSoup or similar”
Comment from 27 Aug 2026 in “Twitter Viewer – View Twitter Without Account” Makes HTML parsing easy
“Then HTML, another world of pain perfectly described in a Stack Overflow answer. Beautifulsoup.”
Comment from 14 Apr 2026 in “Someone Bought 30 WordPress Plugins and Planted a Backdoor in All of Them” “this library came along and made it easy”
Comment from 22 Dec 2025 in “Ask HN: Why Did Python Win?”
Other Python libraries people recommend
The four most recommended other Python libraries, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
See all 14 Python libraries, rankedWhat people said
All 6 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“parse it with BeautifulSoup or similar”
“Then HTML, another world of pain perfectly described in a Stack Overflow answer. Beautifulsoup.”
“forces me to write yet another Python script using Beautifulsoup4”
“Django, Pillow, Requests, BeautifulSoup, and pretty much every other library I use regularly”
“this library came along and made it easy”
“beautiful soup I _think_ was one? I could be misremembering”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.