head to head · open source
EasySpider vs grab
EasySpider has 44,565 GitHub stars, 5,387 forks, 271 open issues and last shipped yesterday. grab has 2,461 stars, 274 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 12 months ago. EasySpider leads on adoption by 1,711% (44,565 vs 2,461 stars). EasySpider is written in JavaScript under AGPL-3.0; grab is written in Python under MIT. EasySpider has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, grab 11%. 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| EasySpider | grab | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 45K | ★ 2.5K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | JavaScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2025-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.4K | ⑂ 274 |
| 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 grab if
- You want the grab feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and grab fits your workflow better
About EasySpider
EasySpider is a visual, code free web crawler and browser automation tool distributed on GitHub under the AGPL 3.0 license. It is written in JavaScript as a graphical application and lives in the web scraping and data extraction ecosystem, sitting alongside browser automation testing tools. It also carries the alias ServiceWrapper, described as an intelligent service encapsulation system for web applications. Development spans roughly six years, with the latest push recorded in September 2026.
read the full EasySpider overview →
About grab
Grab Update (2025 year) Since 2018 (which is the year of most recent Grab release) I have tried to do large refactoring of code base of Grab library. Which ended up with semi working product which nobody uses, including me. I have decided to reset all project files to the state of most recent pypi release 0.6.41 dated by june 2018. At least, now the code base corresponds to live version of the product which is being used by some people, according to pypi stats. I've updated Grab code base and code base of its dependencies to be compatible with Python 2.7 and Python 3.13 (and, hopefully, all py versions between th…
More in Data & Analytics
Related comparisons
More Data Extraction & Web Scraping projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Data Extraction & Web Scraping field.
Frequently asked questions
Is EasySpider or grab more popular?
EasySpider has 44,565 GitHub stars and grab has 2,461. EasySpider has the larger community by that measure.
Are EasySpider and grab free?
Both are open source. EasySpider is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and grab under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between EasySpider and grab?
EasySpider is written in JavaScript and grab 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 grab?
Choose EasySpider if you want the larger community (44,565 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose grab if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.