head to head · open source
firecrawl vs scrapy
firecrawl has 181,744 GitHub stars, 9,838 forks, 621 open issues and last shipped today. scrapy has 64,394 stars, 11,964 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. firecrawl leads on adoption by 182% (181,744 vs 64,394 stars). firecrawl is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause. firecrawl has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, scrapy 19%. firecrawl was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (crawler, scraping), 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
| firecrawl | scrapy | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 182K | ★ 64K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.8K | ⑂ 12K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick firecrawl if
- You weight community size — 182K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick scrapy if
- You want the scrapy feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and scrapy fits your workflow better
About firecrawl
Firecrawl is an open source web context API that enables AI agents to search, scrape, and interact with websites at scale. It lives in the AI and data extraction ecosystem, providing structured, LLM ready outputs from unstructured web content. Built in TypeScript and licensed under AGPL 3.0, it supports both self hosting and a hosted service via firecrawl.dev.
read the full firecrawl overview →
About scrapy
Scrapy is a web scraping framework written in Python, distributed under the BSD 3 Clause license, and described in its own README as a tool to extract structured data from websites. It is cross platform and requires Python 3.10 or newer. The project is maintained by Zyte, formerly known as Scrapinghub, together with a broader group of contributors, and it lives in the Python ecosystem as an installable library rather than a hosted service. Its repository is roughly seventeen years old, which places it among the longer running projects in the web scraping space.
read the full scrapy overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is firecrawl or scrapy more popular?
firecrawl has 181,744 GitHub stars and scrapy has 64,394. firecrawl has the larger community by that measure.
Are firecrawl and scrapy free?
Both are open source. firecrawl is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and scrapy under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between firecrawl and scrapy?
firecrawl is written in TypeScript and scrapy 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, firecrawl or scrapy?
Choose firecrawl if you want the larger community (181,744 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose scrapy if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.