Frontera is an open source web crawling framework that can be used for both single-threaded and distributed crawling. It was developed to address limitations in Scrapy for broad crawls and crawl frontier management. Frontera uses Apache Kafka as a communication layer between components and supports storage backends like Apache HBase. It integrates with Scrapy for process management and page fetching. Frontera provides features for crawl scheduling, URL ordering strategies, and distributed coordination of crawls across multiple spiders and worker processes.