head to head · open source
colly vs toapi
colly has 25,575 GitHub stars, 1,860 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 20 days ago. toapi has 3,558 stars, 241 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. colly leads on adoption by 619% (25,575 vs 3,558 stars). colly is written in Go under Apache-2.0; toapi is written in Python under MIT. colly has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, toapi 7%. 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 | toapi | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 3.6K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-10-16 | 2026-08-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 241 |
| 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 toapi if
- You want the toapi feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and toapi 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 toapi
toapi Turn any website into a JSON API — declaratively. toapi lets you point at a web page, declare the fields you want with CSS selectors, and get back a clean JSON API. No crawler to babysit, no database to maintain — pages are fetched and parsed on demand, with built‑in caching. Install Requires Python 3.10+. Quickstart Run it: Then visit and you get: How it works 1. Route — @api.route("/posts", "/news") maps your API path to a source URL. 2. Fetch — pages are fetched with requests (or a headless browser if you pass browser= ) and cached in memory. 3. Parse — each Item extracts fields with CSS selectors via…
read the full toapi overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is colly or toapi more popular?
colly has 25,575 GitHub stars and toapi has 3,558. colly has the larger community by that measure.
Are colly and toapi free?
Both are open source. colly is licensed under Apache-2.0 and toapi under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between colly and toapi?
colly is written in Go and toapi 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 toapi?
Choose colly if you want the larger community (25,575 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose toapi if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.