head to head · open source
firecrawl vs scrapy
firecrawl has 197,942 GitHub stars, 10,457 forks, 621 open issues and last shipped yesterday. scrapy has 65,180 stars, 12,093 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. firecrawl leads on adoption by 204% (197,942 vs 65,180 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 | ★ 198K | ★ 65K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 10K | ⑂ 12K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick firecrawl if
- You weight community size — 198K 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 The API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale. 🔥 The web context API to find sources, extract content, and turn it into clean Markdown or structured data your agents can ship with. Open source and available as a hosted service. Pst. Hey, you, join our stargazers :) Why Firecrawl? Industry leading reliability : Covers 96% of the web, including JS heavy pages — no proxy headaches, just clean data (see benchmarks) Blazingly fast : P95 latency of 3.4s across millions of pages, built for real time agents and dynamic apps LLM ready output : Clean markdown, structured JSON, screenshots…
read the full firecrawl overview →
About scrapy
.. logo image:: :target: :alt: Scrapy :width: 480px .. version image:: :target: :alt: PyPI Version .. python version image:: :target: :alt: Supported Python Versions .. tests image:: :target: :alt: Tests .. coverage image:: :target: :alt: Coverage report .. conda image:: :target: :alt: Conda Version .. deepwiki image:: :target: :alt: Ask DeepWiki Scrapy is a web scraping framework to extract structured data from websites. It is cross platform, and requires Python 3.10+. It is maintained by Zyte (formerly Scrapinghub) and many other contributors . .. many other contributors: .. Scrapy: .. Zyte: Install with…
read the full scrapy overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is firecrawl or scrapy more popular?
firecrawl has 197,942 GitHub stars and scrapy has 65,180. 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 (197,942 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.