APIs are access points to twitter that twitter has given you access to. You can get whatever twitter decides to reveal to you. Public APIs are available for anyone while private ones are limited.
Data scraping (or screen scraping) is a computer accessing a web page like a human does. It loads it in and then reads the data and then does this over and over again.
APIs are optimized for low resource use (usually) while scraping uses all the resources a human accessing a web page does and the scraper is doing it as fast as possible, possibly thousands of times a second. If you've gotten a CAPTCHA just to open a webpage that CAPTCHA is probably there to prevent data scraping.
APIs are access points to twitter that twitter has given you access to. You can get whatever twitter decides to reveal to you. Public APIs are available for anyone while private ones are limited.
Data scraping (or screen scraping) is a computer accessing a web page like a human does. It loads it in and then reads the data and then does this over and over again.
APIs are optimized for low resource use (usually) while scraping uses all the resources a human accessing a web page does and the scraper is doing it as fast as possible, possibly thousands of times a second. If you've gotten a CAPTCHA just to open a webpage that CAPTCHA is probably there to prevent data scraping.