The best tool depends on what kind of web data you need and how hard the target site is to access. Here’s a practical breakdown:

1) Best overall for large-scale scraping

Scrapy (Python)

• Great for high-volume, structured crawling
• Fast, efficient, and built for scaling
• Good for following links, handling pagination, retries, pipelines, and exporting data
• Best when the site is mostly static or you can fetch data directly from HTML/API

Use if: you want to crawl thousands to millions of pages efficiently.

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2) Best for browser-based/JavaScript-heavy sites

Playwright

• Modern browser automation
• Handles dynamic content, login flows, infinite scroll, and JS rendering well
• More reliable and faster than older tools in many cases

Selenium

• Still widely used
• Good ecosystem, but usually slower and more cumbersome than Playwright for new projects

Use if: the content only appears after JavaScript runs.

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3) Best for quick extraction and prototyping

Beautiful Soup / lxml

• Excellent for parsing HTML
• Not a crawler by itself, but very useful for extracting data from pages you’ve already fetched
• lxml is especially fast

Use if: you already have page content and just need to parse it.

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4) Best for crawling with minimal code

Octoparse

• No-code/low-code scraping platform
• Good for non-developers or fast setups
• Can handle some dynamic sites and exports data easily

ParseHub

• Similar category: visual scraping tool
• Useful for moderately complex sites

Use if: you want speed and convenience over full control.

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5) Best for massive-scale, distributed crawling

Apify

• Cloud-based scraping/crawling platform
• Supports custom actors, proxies, scheduling, and scaling
• Good for production-grade scraping workflows

Heritrix

• Classic large-scale web crawler
• Often used for archiving rather than general scraping

Use if: you need a managed or distributed system at scale.

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6) Best for finding hidden data sources

Browser DevTools / Network inspection

• Often the data is loaded from an underlying API
• If you can find the API, scraping becomes much easier and more stable than parsing rendered HTML

Use if: you want the most efficient route on sites with dynamic content.

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7) Best for general HTTP downloading and automation

Requests / httpx

• Great for fetching pages and APIs directly
• httpx supports async, which helps at scale
• Pair with asyncio, queues, and retries for large jobs

Use if: the site exposes data cleanly via HTML or API endpoints.

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Recommended stacks by scenario

Static websites, large crawl:

• Scrapy + lxml

Dynamic websites with JavaScript:

• Playwright + Beautiful Soup/lxml
• Or Playwright + Scrapy for hybrid setups

API-driven sites:

• httpx/requests + asyncio
• Use the underlying API directly when possible

Non-technical / fast setup:

• Octoparse or ParseHub

Enterprise or scaled production:

• Apify, or custom infrastructure with Scrapy + proxies + queue system

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Important considerations

For collecting large amounts of web data, also plan for:

• Rate limiting
• Retries and backoff
• Proxy management
• Captcha handling
• Data deduplication
• Storage: CSV works for small jobs; databases like PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or data lakes are better at scale
• Compliance: check robots.txt, terms of service, and legal/privacy constraints

If you tell me:

1. whether the sites are static or JS-heavy,
2. how many pages you need, and
3. whether you want no-code or code-based,

I can recommend the best specific tool stack.