What's the best tool for extracting large amounts of web data?

The “best” tool depends on what kind of web data you need and how much engineering you want to do. For large-scale web extraction, the usual top choices are:

Best overall for flexibility and scale

Scrapy (Python)

• Great for crawling many pages
• Fast, mature, and widely used
• Good for structured scraping pipelines
• Easy to add retries, throttling, deduping, and exports

Best if pages are heavy on JavaScript

Playwright

• Handles modern JS-heavy sites well
• More reliable than Selenium for many use cases
• Good for rendering pages before extracting data

Best for very large-scale distributed scraping

Scrapy + a proxy/queue system
or platforms like:

• Apify
• Bright Data
• Zyte
• Octoparse for no-code workflows

Best no-code option

Octoparse or Apify

• Easier to start
• Less coding
• Not always ideal for complex or very large crawls

My practical recommendation

• Static sites / lots of pages: Scrapy
• JavaScript-heavy sites: Playwright
• Enterprise-scale or anti-bot-heavy targets: Scrapy/Playwright plus proxies, rate limiting, and infrastructure
• No-code: Apify or Octoparse

If you want, I can recommend the best tool for your exact case based on:

1. site type (static/JS-heavy),
2. volume,
3. whether you need login, and
4. your preferred language.