head to head · open source
EasySpider vs gain
EasySpider has 44,765 GitHub stars, 5,392 forks, 271 open issues and last shipped yesterday. gain has 2,017 stars, 203 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. EasySpider leads on adoption by 2,119% (44,765 vs 2,017 stars). EasySpider is written in JavaScript under AGPL-3.0; gain is written in Python under MIT. EasySpider has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, gain 10%. EasySpider was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (crawler), 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
| EasySpider | gain | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 45K | ★ 2.0K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | JavaScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-08-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.4K | ⑂ 203 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick EasySpider if
- You weight community size — 45K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick gain if
- You want the gain feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and gain fits your workflow better
About EasySpider
易采集/EasySpider: Visual Code Free Web Crawler 一个 完全免费 （ 包括商业使用和二次开发 ）的可视化浏览器自动化测试/数据采集/爬虫软件，可以使用图形化界面，无代码可视化的设计和执行任务。只需要在网页上选择自己想要操作的内容并根据提示框操作即可完成任务的设计和执行。同时软件还可以单独以命令行的方式进行执行，从而可以很方便的嵌入到其他系统中。 A completely free (including for commercial use and secondary development) visual browser automation test/data collection/crawler software, which can be used to design and execute tasks in a code free visual way. You only need to select the content you want to operate on the web page and follow the prompts to complete the design and execution of the task. At the same time, the software can also be executed separately in…
read the full EasySpider overview →
About gain
gain Async web crawling framework for everyone. Built on asyncio , aiohttp , and lxml / pyquery . Declare items and parsers; gain handles the concurrency, retries, and persistence. Install Linux users can opt into uvloop for an extra speed bump: Requires Python 3.10+. Quickstart Run it: XPath parsers How it works 1. Spider kicks off from start url under a concurrency budget. 2. Parsers either follow (one argument) — discovering more URLs to queue — or extract (two arguments) — instantiating an Item from each matching page. 3. Items use Css / Xpath / Regex selectors to pull fields out of HTML. 4. save() is your…
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Frequently asked questions
Is EasySpider or gain more popular?
EasySpider has 44,765 GitHub stars and gain has 2,017. EasySpider has the larger community by that measure.
Are EasySpider and gain free?
Both are open source. EasySpider is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and gain under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between EasySpider and gain?
EasySpider is written in JavaScript and gain 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, EasySpider or gain?
Choose EasySpider if you want the larger community (44,765 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose gain if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.