head to head · open source
EasySpider vs toapi
EasySpider has 44,765 GitHub stars, 5,392 forks, 271 open issues and last shipped yesterday. toapi has 3,558 stars, 241 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. EasySpider leads on adoption by 1,158% (44,765 vs 3,558 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| EasySpider | toapi | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 45K | ★ 3.6K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | JavaScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 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
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 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…
read the full toapi overview →
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 toapi more popular?
EasySpider has 44,765 GitHub stars and toapi has 3,558. 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 (44,765 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose toapi if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.