head to head · open source
katana vs gain
katana has 17,531 GitHub stars, 1,185 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. gain has 2,019 stars, 204 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. katana leads on adoption by 768% (17,531 vs 2,019 stars). katana is written in Go under MIT; gain is written in Python under MIT. katana has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, gain 10%. katana 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
| katana | gain | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 18K | ★ 2.0K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-14 | 2026-08-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.2K | ⑂ 204 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick katana if
- You weight community size — 18K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick gain if
- You want the gain feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and gain fits your workflow better
About katana
Katana is an open source, MIT licensed crawling and spidering framework written in Go, built for security engineers and automation pipelines that need to map web applications at scale rather than explore them by hand.
read the full katana overview →
About gain
gain is an MIT licensed, asyncio based web crawling framework for Python that lets developers declare items and parsers while the framework handles concurrency, retries, and persistence on their behalf.
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Frequently asked questions
Is katana or gain more popular?
katana has 17,531 GitHub stars and gain has 2,019. katana has the larger community by that measure.
Are katana and gain free?
Both are open source. katana is licensed under MIT and gain under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between katana and gain?
katana is written in Go and gain 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, katana or gain?
Choose katana if you want the larger community (17,531 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose gain if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.