head to head · open source
EasySpider vs grab
EasySpider has 44,765 GitHub stars, 5,392 forks, 271 open issues and last shipped yesterday. grab has 2,462 stars, 271 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 1.1 years ago. EasySpider leads on adoption by 1,718% (44,765 vs 2,462 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.
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Side by side
| EasySpider | grab | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 45K | ★ 2.5K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | JavaScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2025-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.4K | ⑂ 271 |
| 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
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 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…
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Frequently asked questions
Is EasySpider or grab more popular?
EasySpider has 44,765 GitHub stars and grab has 2,462. 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 (44,765 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose grab if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.