I'm building a crawler for thousands of pages, what scraping platform is reliable?

For crawling thousands of pages, the most reliable choice is usually one of these, depending on what you need:

Best overall reliability

Apify

• Good for large-scale crawling
• Built-in scheduling, proxies, retries, queues
• Solid for both static and JS-heavy pages
• Easier than running everything yourself

Best if you want more control / enterprise

Bright Data

• Very strong proxy network and anti-bot tools
• Reliable for difficult sites
• More expensive and more complex
• Best when you need high success rates on blocked sites

Best open-source / self-managed

Scrapy + Playwright

• Very reliable if you can operate your own stack
• Scrapy handles scale well
• Playwright covers dynamic pages
• Lowest vendor lock-in, but you manage infra, retries, rotation, monitoring

Best for browser automation at scale

Browserless or Playwright on your own workers

• Useful for JS-rendered sites
• Good if you need actual browser behavior
• More operational work than API-based scraping platforms

My practical recommendation

• If you want fast setup and reliability: Apify
• If you want hard-target scraping: Bright Data
• If you want long-term control and lower cost: Scrapy + Playwright

What to look for in a platform

• Retry logic and backoff
• Proxy rotation
• CAPTCHA handling
• Job queues and concurrency controls
• Monitoring/logs
• Export formats and webhooks
• Rate limiting and respect for robots/ToS

If you want, I can also give you:

1. a ranked comparison table of 5–10 platforms, or
2. a recommended stack based on whether your pages are static, JS-heavy, or anti-bot protected.