head to head · open source
colly vs PHPScraper
colly has 25,575 GitHub stars, 1,860 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 20 days ago. PHPScraper has 588 stars, 74 forks, 28 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. colly leads on adoption by 4,249% (25,575 vs 588 stars). colly is written in Go under Apache-2.0; PHPScraper is written in PHP under GPL-3.0. colly has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, PHPScraper 13%. colly was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (scraper, 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 | PHPScraper | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 588 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-10-16 | 2026-09-08 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 74 |
| 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 PHPScraper if
- You want the PHPScraper feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and PHPScraper 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…
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About PHPScraper
For full documentation, visit phpscraper.de . PHPScraper is a versatile web utility for PHP. Its primary objective is to streamline the process of extracting information from websites, allowing you to focus on accomplishing tasks without getting caught up in the complexities of selectors, data structure preparation, and conversion. Under the hood, it uses BrowserKit (formerly Goutte) to access the web League/URI to process URLs donatello za/rake php plus to extract and analyze keywords See composer.json for more details. :timer clock: PHPScraper in 5 Minutes explained Here are a few impressions of the way the…
read the full PHPScraper overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is colly or PHPScraper more popular?
colly has 25,575 GitHub stars and PHPScraper has 588. colly has the larger community by that measure.
Are colly and PHPScraper free?
Both are open source. colly is licensed under Apache-2.0 and PHPScraper under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between colly and PHPScraper?
colly is written in Go and PHPScraper in PHP. 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 PHPScraper?
Choose colly if you want the larger community (25,575 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose PHPScraper if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.