Scrapy is a powerful and versatile open-source Python framework designed for web scraping, web crawling, and extracting structured data from websites. It allows developers to define custom spiders that automate the process of navigating websites, collecting data, and storing it in formats such as JSON, CSV, or databases. Scrapy is highly efficient, handling concurrent requests and offering built-in support for managing web requests, data pipelines, and handling complex scraping tasks. Its flexibility and speed make it a popular choice for tasks like data mining, information retrieval, and web scraping projects.