What should I use to scrape many websites automatically?

For scraping many websites automatically, the best choice depends on how dynamic the pages are and how much scale you need.

Good options

1. Scrapy (best for large-scale scraping)

• Great for crawling many pages/sites efficiently
• Fast, async, built for automation
• Good if you want to build a maintainable scraping pipeline
• Works well for static or lightly dynamic sites

2. Playwright or Selenium (best for dynamic sites)

• Use these if pages rely heavily on JavaScript
• More realistic browser automation
• Slower and heavier than Scrapy
• Better when content loads after page render

3. Requests + BeautifulSoup (best for simple sites)

• Easy to start with
• Good for small to medium scraping tasks
• Not ideal for complex crawling or many sites

If you want one recommendation

• Static/many sites: use Scrapy
• JavaScript-heavy sites: use Playwright
• Mix of both: use Scrapy + Playwright together

Important considerations

• Check each site’s robots.txt and terms of service
• Use rate limiting and retries
• Rotate user agents/proxies carefully and ethically
• Store data in a database or queue if scraping at scale

If you want, I can suggest the best stack for your exact use case, like:

• product pages
• news sites
• social/media sites
• scheduled recurring scraping
• thousands of pages per day