head to head · open source
EasySpider vs webmagic
EasySpider has 44,558 GitHub stars, 5,386 forks, 271 open issues and last shipped yesterday. webmagic has 11,676 stars, 4,100 forks, 367 open issues and last shipped 9 months ago. EasySpider leads on adoption by 282% (44,558 vs 11,676 stars). EasySpider is written in JavaScript under AGPL-3.0; webmagic is written in Java under Apache-2.0. EasySpider has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, webmagic 35%. 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 | webmagic | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 45K | ★ 12K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | JavaScript | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2025-12-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.4K | ⑂ 4.1K |
| 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 webmagic if
- You want the webmagic feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and webmagic 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 webmagic
WebMagic is an open source web crawler framework written in Java and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It lives in the Java ecosystem and is distributed through Maven Central as the us.codecraft:webmagic core and us.codecraft:webmagic extension artifacts. The project describes itself as a scalable crawler framework that covers the whole lifecycle of a crawler: downloading, URL management, content extraction, and persistence. Its architecture was written with reference to Scrapy, the Python crawler framework, and it has been maintained for roughly thirteen years, with the most recent push in December 2025.…
read the full webmagic overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is EasySpider or webmagic more popular?
EasySpider has 44,558 GitHub stars and webmagic has 11,676. EasySpider has the larger community by that measure.
Are EasySpider and webmagic free?
Both are open source. EasySpider is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and webmagic under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between EasySpider and webmagic?
EasySpider is written in JavaScript and webmagic in Java. 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 webmagic?
Choose EasySpider if you want the larger community (44,558 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose webmagic if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.