head to head · open source
colly vs ruia
colly has 25,533 GitHub stars, 1,861 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. ruia has 1,737 stars, 185 forks, 9 open issues and last shipped 10 days ago. colly leads on adoption by 1,370% (25,533 vs 1,737 stars). colly is written in Go under Apache-2.0; ruia is written in Python under Apache-2.0. colly has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, ruia 11%. ruia 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 | ruia | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 1.7K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 185 |
| 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 ruia if
- You want the ruia feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and ruia 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 ruia
Ruia is an asynchronous web scraping micro framework for Python 3.6 and above, built on asyncio and aiohttp , and intended for Python developers who want to declare what a crawler should collect and let the framework handle concurrent requests.
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Frequently asked questions
Is colly or ruia more popular?
colly has 25,533 GitHub stars and ruia has 1,737. colly has the larger community by that measure.
Are colly and ruia free?
Both are open source. colly is licensed under Apache-2.0 and ruia under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between colly and ruia?
colly is written in Go and ruia 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 ruia?
Choose colly if you want the larger community (25,533 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose ruia if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.