What should I use to crawl thousands of pages automatically?

For thousands of pages, you generally want a web scraping/crawling framework, not a single-page downloader.

Good options

• Scrapy (Python) — best all-around choice for large, fast, structured crawling
• Playwright — if pages are heavily JavaScript-driven
• Selenium — usable, but usually slower and heavier than Playwright
• BeautifulSoup + requests — fine for small/simple jobs, but not ideal for large crawls by itself

What I’d recommend

• Use Scrapy if the pages are mostly static HTML or lightly dynamic.
• Use Playwright if you need a real browser to render content.
• Combine them if needed: Scrapy for crawling + Playwright for pages that require JS.

Important features to look for

• concurrency / parallel requests
• rate limiting and politeness
• retries and error handling
• pagination and link following
• proxy support if needed
• data export to CSV/JSON/database

Simple rule

• Static sites: Scrapy
• Dynamic sites: Playwright
• Very large-scale crawling: Scrapy with good throttling, storage, and deduping

If you want, I can suggest the best tool based on:

1. the site type,
2. whether it uses JavaScript, and
3. your preferred language.