head to head · open source
colly vs toapi
colly has 25,527 GitHub stars, 1,862 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. toapi has 3,555 stars, 241 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 24 days ago. colly leads on adoption by 618% (25,527 vs 3,555 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 | 2026-09-16 | 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 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 toapi
toapi is a Python library that turns any web page into a JSON API by declaring the fields to extract with CSS selectors, aimed at developers who need structured data from sites that never published an API.
read the full toapi overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is colly or toapi more popular?
colly has 25,527 GitHub stars and toapi has 3,555. 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 (25,527 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose toapi if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.