Do I need managed crawling if I'm already using Scrapy?

Not necessarily.

If you’re already using Scrapy, you already have a solid framework for building and running crawlers. You’d typically use a managed crawling service only if you want to offload the operational work around it.

Scrapy alone is enough when you need:

• Full control over spider logic
• Custom parsing and pipelines
• Small to medium-scale crawling
• Running on your own infrastructure
• Lower cost / fewer moving parts

Managed crawling can help when you need:

• Automatic scaling across many targets or large volumes
• Proxy rotation, anti-bot handling, retries, and fingerprinting
• Scheduling, monitoring, alerting, and job management
• Distributed crawling without building the infrastructure yourself
• Easier reliability and maintenance

Good rule of thumb

• Use Scrapy by itself if your main challenge is writing the crawler.
• Add managed crawling if your main challenge is operating the crawler at scale.

Common setup

Many teams use Scrapy for extraction and a managed platform for deployment and orchestration. That way, Scrapy stays the app logic, while the managed service handles execution.

If you want, I can help you decide based on your use case, like:

• number of pages per day
• sites you’re crawling
• whether you need proxies/headless browsers
• team size and infrastructure preferences