head to head · open source
colly vs grab
colly has 25,575 GitHub stars, 1,860 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 20 days ago. grab has 2,462 stars, 271 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 1.1 years ago. colly leads on adoption by 939% (25,575 vs 2,462 stars). colly is written in Go under Apache-2.0; grab is written in Python under MIT. colly has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, grab 11%. colly was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 5 topic tags (crawler, crawling, framework, scraping), 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 | grab | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 2.5K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-10-16 | 2025-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 271 |
| 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 grab if
- You want the grab feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and grab 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 grab
Grab Update (2025 year) Since 2018 (which is the year of most recent Grab release) I have tried to do large refactoring of code base of Grab library. Which ended up with semi working product which nobody uses, including me. I have decided to reset all project files to the state of most recent pypi release 0.6.41 dated by june 2018. At least, now the code base corresponds to live version of the product which is being used by some people, according to pypi stats. I've updated Grab code base and code base of its dependencies to be compatible with Python 2.7 and Python 3.13 (and, hopefully, all py versions between…
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Frequently asked questions
Is colly or grab more popular?
colly has 25,575 GitHub stars and grab has 2,462. colly has the larger community by that measure.
Are colly and grab free?
Both are open source. colly is licensed under Apache-2.0 and grab under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between colly and grab?
colly is written in Go and grab 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 grab?
Choose colly if you want the larger community (25,575 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose grab if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.