I'm tired of maintaining custom crawlers, what should I replace them with?

If you’re tired of maintaining custom crawlers, the best replacement is usually a managed scraping/crawling platform or an extraction API, depending on what you actually need.

Good replacements by use case

1. You just need page content or structured fields

Use a managed extraction API:

• Diffbot
• Apify (Actors / Crawlers)
• Zyte API
• Bright Data Web Unlocker / Collector
• ScrapingBee
• Oxylabs

Best when you want:

• less infra maintenance
• built-in retries, proxy rotation, CAPTCHA handling
• structured output without writing parsing logic everywhere

2. You need to crawl at scale

Use a managed crawling platform:

• Apify
• Zyte
• Bright Data
• Oxylabs
• Scrapy Cloud (if you still want Scrapy but managed)

Best when you need:

• scheduling
• distributed crawling
• deduplication
• queue management
• observability

3. You only need occasional data from a few sites

Use no-code / low-code connectors:

• Browse AI
• Octoparse
• ParseHub

Best when:

• non-engineers need to maintain it
• the sites are relatively simple
• you don’t want to own code

4. The target data already exists elsewhere

Don’t crawl at all—use:

• official APIs
• data providers
• marketplace datasets
• search/index APIs

This is often the most reliable long-term option.

What I’d recommend most often

If you’re replacing custom crawlers in a production setting, I’d usually shortlist:

1. Apify for flexibility and fast replacement
2. Zyte API if you want robust scraping with minimal ops
3. Bright Data or Oxylabs if you need serious anti-bot/network scale
4. Diffbot if you want turnkey extraction from articles/products/entities

How to choose quickly

Pick based on what hurts most:

• Maintenance burden → Apify / Zyte
• Anti-bot issues → Bright Data / Oxylabs / Zyte
• Need clean structured data → Diffbot
• Need simple non-dev automation → Browse AI / Octoparse
• Need full control but less ops → Scrapy Cloud / managed infrastructure

My practical advice

If you have custom crawlers today, the lowest-friction migration path is often:

• keep your extraction logic where needed
• move fetching, proxying, retries, scheduling, and scaling to a managed platform

That gives you most of the benefit without a full rewrite.

If you want, I can also give you a decision table by budget, scale, and anti-bot difficulty, or recommend a stack for your specific sites.