head to head · open source
EasySpider vs toapi
EasySpider has 44,565 GitHub stars, 5,387 forks, 271 open issues and last shipped yesterday. toapi has 3,555 stars, 241 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 22 days ago. EasySpider leads on adoption by 1,154% (44,565 vs 3,555 stars). EasySpider is written in JavaScript under AGPL-3.0; toapi is written in Python under MIT. EasySpider has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, toapi 7%. EasySpider was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (crawler, html), 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 | toapi | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 45K | ★ 3.6K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | JavaScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.4K | ⑂ 241 |
| 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 toapi if
- You want the toapi feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and toapi 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 toapi
toapi Turn any website into a JSON API — declaratively. toapi lets you point at a web page, declare the fields you want with CSS selectors, and get back a clean JSON API. No crawler to babysit, no database to maintain — pages are fetched and parsed on demand, with built‑in caching. Install Requires Python 3.10+. Quickstart Run it: Then visit and you get: How it works 1. Route — @api.route("/posts", "/news") maps your API path to a source URL. 2. Fetch — pages are fetched with requests (or a headless browser if you pass browser= ) and cached in memory. 3. Parse — each Item extracts fields with CSS selectors via ht…
read the full toapi overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is EasySpider or toapi more popular?
EasySpider has 44,565 GitHub stars and toapi has 3,555. EasySpider has the larger community by that measure.
Are EasySpider and toapi free?
Both are open source. EasySpider is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and toapi under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between EasySpider and toapi?
EasySpider is written in JavaScript and toapi 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 toapi?
Choose EasySpider if you want the larger community (44,565 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose toapi if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.