Cheerio is a lean implementation of core jQuery designed specifically for the server. jQuery is an open-source JavaScript library that simplifies DOM manipulation by allowing users to find, select and manipulate elements with specific properties, making it easier to navigate web applications.
On the other hand, Cheerio is an implementation of core jQuery in the server used for parsing HTML and XML in Node.js. This gives Cheerio a familiar syntax while providing a powerful API for traversing and manipulating resulting data structures, making it an essential tool for web scraping.
Therefore, Cheerio and jQuery are not really different since, at its core, Cheerio library uses jQuery library. The difference between them is that Cheerio is a library for a lot of things, while jQuery is applied specifically for querying selectors on web pages.
If you don't feel like learning jQuery to use it for your scraping projects, take a look at Vanilla JS Scraper . It's a non-jQuery alternative which still uses raw HTTP requests to extract data from webpages using Node.js code.