Hi there,
to avoid confusions:
- the Palladian nodes are free (for use in free KNIME versions)
- the Selenium nodes are paid
In case you’re wondering whether the Selenium Nodes are the right tool for your task, I invite you to give the free 30-day trial a go.
From my experience:
I’ve used the Selenium Nodes several times to crawl high amounts of pages. Of course, there is a larger performance overhead compared to a pure “download page” approach like with Palladian, but you can often optimize/parallelize/etc. Still, your throughput will always be slower with the Selenium Node, as these are using a real Web browser. But often, that’s the only way to access current web pages resp. web apps.
My suggestion: Try out the trial version and see whether it works for your problems. Feel free to get back if you need any advice regarding optimization.
Best,
Philipp