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The mechanize node module automates interactions with websites. It is used to scrape websites. It is based on the Ruby gem mechanize by Aaron Patterson.

Unlike a process-heavy application like PhatomJS, Mechanize is light and quick. It doesn't instantiate a full page rendering of each page accessed like a headless browser. The drawback is that it doesn't execute JavaScript on the page, it simply downloads the page and provides methods to process it. The advantages include speed, small memory footprint (great for scraping or spidering), and low server resource utilization.