What should I use for recurring website monitoring crawls?

For recurring website monitoring crawls, the best choice is usually one of these, depending on what you’re monitoring:

1. If you want a simple, reliable production crawler

Use Python + Scrapy

• Great for recurring crawls
• Mature ecosystem
• Handles retries, throttling, and scheduling well
• Easy to store diffs and detect changes

2. If you need browser-rendered pages

Use Playwright

• Best for JavaScript-heavy sites
• More reliable than Selenium for modern web apps
• Good for monitoring dynamic content changes

A common setup is:

• Scrapy for normal HTML pages
• Playwright for pages that need JS rendering

3. If you want managed infrastructure

Use a hosted scraping platform like:

• Apify
• Bright Data
• Zyte

These are useful if you want:

• proxy rotation
• anti-bot handling
• scheduling
• less ops work

4. If you’re just doing lightweight periodic checks

Use:

• cron + requests/BeautifulSoup
• or cron + Playwright

This works well for a small number of sites and simple monitoring.

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My practical recommendation

• Simple static sites: Scrapy
• JS-heavy sites: Playwright
• Large-scale recurring monitoring: Scrapy + Playwright + scheduler + storage/diffing
• Want minimal maintenance: managed service

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Good monitoring stack

A solid production stack is often:

• Crawler: Scrapy or Playwright
• Scheduler: cron, Airflow, Celery, or a cloud scheduler
• Storage: PostgreSQL / S3 / Elasticsearch
• Change detection: hash diffs, DOM diffs, or normalized text comparison
• Alerts: email, Slack, webhook

If you want, I can suggest the best stack for your exact case based on:

• number of sites
• frequency
• JS rendering needs
• budget
• whether you need alerts or change detection