head to head · open source
changedetection.io vs gain
changedetection.io has 34,312 GitHub stars, 2,064 forks, 385 open issues and last shipped today. gain has 2,018 stars, 204 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. changedetection.io leads on adoption by 1,600% (34,312 vs 2,018 stars). changedetection.io is written in Python under Apache-2.0; gain is written in Python under MIT. changedetection.io has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, gain 10%. changedetection.io was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| changedetection.io | gain | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 34K | ★ 2.0K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-08-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.1K | ⑂ 204 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick changedetection.io if
- You weight community size — 34K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick gain if
- You want the gain feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and gain fits your workflow better
About changedetection.io
changedetection.io is an open source website change detection and web page monitoring tool written in Python and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It watches URLs, detects when their content changes, and sends alerts through channels such as Discord, Email, Slack, Telegram, and Webhook. The project lives in the Data & Analytics / Data Extraction & Web Scraping ecosystem, carries more than 34,000 stars and 2,000 forks on GitHub, and has been developed for roughly six years. It is designed to be self hosted, and the same codebase also backs a hosted subscription service offered by the maintainers.…
read the full changedetection.io overview →
About gain
gain Async web crawling framework for everyone. Built on asyncio , aiohttp , and lxml / pyquery . Declare items and parsers; gain handles the concurrency, retries, and persistence. Install Linux users can opt into uvloop for an extra speed bump: Requires Python 3.10+. Quickstart Run it: XPath parsers How it works 1. Spider kicks off from start url under a concurrency budget. 2. Parsers either follow (one argument) — discovering more URLs to queue — or extract (two arguments) — instantiating an Item from each matching page. 3. Items use Css / Xpath / Regex selectors to pull fields out of HTML. 4. save() is your as…
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Frequently asked questions
Is changedetection.io or gain more popular?
changedetection.io has 34,312 GitHub stars and gain has 2,018. changedetection.io has the larger community by that measure.
Are changedetection.io and gain free?
Both are open source. changedetection.io is licensed under Apache-2.0 and gain under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between changedetection.io and gain?
changedetection.io is written in Python and gain in Python. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, changedetection.io or gain?
Choose changedetection.io if you want the larger community (34,312 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose gain if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.