head to head · open source
colly vs gain
colly has 25,575 GitHub stars, 1,860 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 20 days ago. gain has 2,017 stars, 202 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. colly leads on adoption by 1,168% (25,575 vs 2,017 stars). colly is written in Go under Apache-2.0; gain is written in Python under MIT. colly has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, gain 10%. colly was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (crawler, spider), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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
| colly | gain | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 2.0K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-10-16 | 2026-08-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 202 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick colly if
- You weight community size — 26K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- 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 colly
Colly Lightning Fast and Elegant Scraping Framework for Gophers Colly provides a clean interface to write any kind of crawler/scraper/spider. With Colly you can easily extract structured data from websites, which can be used for a wide range of applications, like data mining, data processing or archiving. Sponsors NodeMaven: The most efficient proxy provider for Web Scrapping and Automation with the Highest Quality IP on the market. Why NodeMaven? 99.9% uptime ZIP Targeting IP filtering: all proxies have fraud score 1k request/sec on a single core) Manages request delays and maximum concurrency per domain…
read the full colly 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…
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Frequently asked questions
Is colly or gain more popular?
colly has 25,575 GitHub stars and gain has 2,017. colly has the larger community by that measure.
Are colly and gain free?
Both are open source. colly is licensed under Apache-2.0 and gain under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between colly and gain?
colly is written in Go 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, colly or gain?
Choose colly if you want the larger community (25,575 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose gain if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.