head to head · open source
colly vs gain
colly has 25,527 GitHub stars, 1,862 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. gain has 2,019 stars, 204 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. colly leads on adoption by 1,164% (25,527 vs 2,019 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 | 2026-09-16 | 2026-08-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 204 |
| 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 is an open source scraping and crawling framework written in Go, distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. It lives in the Go ecosystem and is consumed as a library rather than a standalone application: the README describes it as providing a clean interface for writing any kind of crawler, scraper, or spider, and the project's own topics list it as a crawler, crawling framework, scraper, scraping tool, and spider. The repository has been public for roughly nine years, carries 25,516 stars and 1,862 forks, and its most recent push was on 2 September 2026. Documentation and examples are hosted at go colly.org…
read the full colly overview →
About gain
gain is an MIT licensed, asyncio based web crawling framework for Python that lets developers declare items and parsers while the framework handles concurrency, retries, and persistence on their behalf.
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Frequently asked questions
Is colly or gain more popular?
colly has 25,527 GitHub stars and gain has 2,019. 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 (25,527 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose gain if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.