head to head · open source
EasySpider vs newspaper4k
EasySpider has 44,565 GitHub stars, 5,387 forks, 271 open issues and last shipped yesterday. newspaper4k has 1,139 stars, 116 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped 25 days ago. EasySpider leads on adoption by 3,813% (44,565 vs 1,139 stars). EasySpider is written in JavaScript under AGPL-3.0; newspaper4k is written in Python under MIT. EasySpider has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, newspaper4k 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 | newspaper4k | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 45K | ★ 1.1K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | JavaScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.4K | ⑂ 116 |
| 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 newspaper4k if
- You want the newspaper4k feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and newspaper4k 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 newspaper4k
Newspaper4k: Article Scraping & Curation, a continuation of the beloved newspaper3k by codelucas Newspaper4k Project grew from a fork of the well known newspaper3k by codelucas which was not updated since September 2020. The initial goal of this fork was to keep the project alive and to add new features and fix bugs. As of version 0.9.3 there are many new features and improvements that make Newspaper4k a great tool for article scraping and curation. To make the migration to Newspaper4k easier, all the classes and methods from the original project were kept and the new features were added on top of them. All API c…
read the full newspaper4k overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is EasySpider or newspaper4k more popular?
EasySpider has 44,565 GitHub stars and newspaper4k has 1,139. EasySpider has the larger community by that measure.
Are EasySpider and newspaper4k free?
Both are open source. EasySpider is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and newspaper4k under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between EasySpider and newspaper4k?
EasySpider is written in JavaScript and newspaper4k 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 newspaper4k?
Choose EasySpider if you want the larger community (44,565 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose newspaper4k if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.