head to head · open source

scrapy vs crawlee

scrapy has 65,180 GitHub stars, 12,093 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. crawlee has 26,317 stars, 1,740 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. scrapy leads on adoption by 148% (65,180 vs 26,317 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, crawlee 7%. crawlee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (crawler, crawling), 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.

scrapy ★ 65K crawlee ★ 26K category Data & Analytics

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Side by side

scrapy crawlee
GitHub stars ★ 65K ★ 26K
License BSD-3-Clause Apache-2.0
Written in Python TypeScript
Last push 2026-11-02 2026-11-02
Forks ⑂ 12K ⑂ 1.7K
Self-hosting Yes Yes
Data ownership Your server Your server

pick scrapy if

  • You weight community size — 65K stars and counting
  • You want the BSD-3-Clause license terms
  • Your stack matches Python
  • You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance

full scrapy profile →

pick crawlee if

  • You want the crawlee feature set and don't need the biggest community
  • You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
  • Your stack matches TypeScript
  • You evaluated both and crawlee fits your workflow better

full crawlee profile →

About scrapy

.. logo image:: :target: :alt: Scrapy :width: 480px .. version image:: :target: :alt: PyPI Version .. python version image:: :target: :alt: Supported Python Versions .. tests image:: :target: :alt: Tests .. coverage image:: :target: :alt: Coverage report .. conda image:: :target: :alt: Conda Version .. deepwiki image:: :target: :alt: Ask DeepWiki Scrapy is a web scraping framework to extract structured data from websites. It is cross platform, and requires Python 3.10+. It is maintained by Zyte (formerly Scrapinghub) and many other contributors . .. many other contributors: .. Scrapy: .. Zyte: Install with…

read the full scrapy overview →

About crawlee

A web scraping and browser automation library Crawlee covers your crawling and scraping end to end and helps you build reliable scrapers. Fast. Your crawlers will appear human like and fly under the radar of modern bot protections even with the default configuration. Crawlee gives you the tools to crawl the web for links, scrape data, and store it to disk or cloud while staying configurable to suit your project's needs. Crawlee is available as the crawlee NPM package. 👉 View full documentation, guides and examples on the Crawlee project website 👈 Do you prefer 🐍 Python instead of JavaScript? 👉 Checkout…

read the full crawlee overview →

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Frequently asked questions

Is scrapy or crawlee more popular?

scrapy has 65,180 GitHub stars and crawlee has 26,317. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.

Are scrapy and crawlee free?

Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and crawlee under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.

What is the difference between scrapy and crawlee?

scrapy is written in Python and crawlee in TypeScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.

Which should I choose, scrapy or crawlee?

Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (65,180 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose crawlee if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.