"Crawl Stats in Search Console tells me how Google crawls my site."

"Crawl Stats in Search Console tells me how Google crawls my site."

Partly. It's the summary; the log files are the transcript.

The comparison: GSC Crawl Stats versus raw server logs. Crawl Stats gives you Google's aggregate numbers — total requests, average response time, broad buckets by response code and file type. Free, fast, directional. Server logs give you every individual hit: which bot, which exact URL, what status, what timestamp.

When Crawl Stats is enough: "is crawling roughly healthy and stable?" The trend line answers that.

When you need logs: "is Googlebot wasting 40% of its budget on faceted-filter URLs and ignoring my new section?" Crawl Stats can't see that. Logs can — you grep for the bot, group by path, and the waste is right there in the distribution.

The mistake is auditing crawl budget from the dashboard. The dashboard tells you the total fuel burned. The logs tell you the car spent the afternoon driving in circles.

(Verify the bot by reverse-DNS, not user-agent. Half your "Googlebot" hits are scrapers wearing the badge.)