head to head · open source
colly vs grab
colly has 25,527 GitHub stars, 1,862 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. grab has 2,463 stars, 274 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 1.0 years ago. colly leads on adoption by 936% (25,527 vs 2,463 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 | 2026-09-16 | 2025-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 274 |
| 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 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 grab
Grab is a Python web scraping framework that gives developers helpers to make network requests, scrape websites, and process the scraped content, and it is aimed at Python programmers who build crawlers and data extraction pipelines.
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Frequently asked questions
Is colly or grab more popular?
colly has 25,527 GitHub stars and grab has 2,463. 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 (25,527 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose grab if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.