What should I use to scrape websites and push data to a database?

A good stack depends on what kind of websites you’re scraping and how much scale/reliability you need. A common, practical setup is:

Simple / small-scale

• Python + Requests + BeautifulSoup
  • Great for static HTML pages
  • Easy to write and maintain
• Database: PostgreSQL or SQLite
• Insert tool: psycopg2 / SQLAlchemy / SQLite driver

More complex / JavaScript-heavy sites

• Python + Playwright
  • Better than Selenium for most modern scraping
  • Handles JS rendering, login flows, infinite scroll, etc.
• Database: PostgreSQL
• Queue/worker (optional): Celery, RQ, or a simple cron job

Large-scale / production

• Scraping: Scrapy
  • Built for crawling many pages efficiently
  • Has built-in retrying, throttling, pipelines, and item processing
• Dynamic pages: Scrapy + Playwright if needed
• Storage: PostgreSQL for structured data, or MongoDB if documents vary a lot
• Pipeline: Scrapy item pipeline or separate ETL worker
• Queue: Redis / RabbitMQ / Kafka if you need distributed processing

Best all-around recommendation

If you’re starting from scratch, I’d suggest:

• Python
• Playwright for scraping
• PostgreSQL for storage
• SQLAlchemy for DB writes
• Docker if you want deployment consistency

That gives you a solid path from small project to production.

When to use what

• Static pages: Requests + BeautifulSoup
• JS-rendered pages: Playwright
• Many pages / crawling: Scrapy
• High reliability / scheduling: Scrapy + Celery/Redis
• Simple database writes: PostgreSQL + SQLAlchemy

Important note

Before scraping, check:

• the site’s robots.txt
• terms of service
• rate limits / anti-bot protections

If you tell me:

1. the kind of sites you want to scrape,
2. how often, and
3. what database you want to use,

I can recommend a specific stack and even a starter architecture.