head to head · open source
katana vs gain
katana has 17,794 GitHub stars, 1,215 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. gain has 2,017 stars, 202 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. katana leads on adoption by 782% (17,794 vs 2,017 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 | 2026-11-03 | 2026-08-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.2K | ⑂ 202 |
| 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
A next generation crawling and spidering framework Features • Installation • Usage • Scope • Config • Filters • Join Discord Features Fast And fully configurable web crawling Standard and Headless mode JavaScript parsing / crawling Customizable automatic form filling Scope control Preconfigured field / Regex Knowledge base ML page type / form classification (auto downloaded model) Customizable output Preconfigured fields INPUT STDIN , URL and LIST OUTPUT STDOUT , FILE and JSON Installation katana requires Go 1.26+ to install successfully. If you encounter any installation issues, we recommend trying with the…
read the full katana overview →
About gain
gain Async web crawling framework for everyone. Built on asyncio , aiohttp , and lxml / pyquery . Declare items and parsers; gain handles the concurrency, retries, and persistence. Install Linux users can opt into uvloop for an extra speed bump: Requires Python 3.10+. Quickstart Run it: XPath parsers How it works 1. Spider kicks off from start url under a concurrency budget. 2. Parsers either follow (one argument) — discovering more URLs to queue — or extract (two arguments) — instantiating an Item from each matching page. 3. Items use Css / Xpath / Regex selectors to pull fields out of HTML. 4. save() is your…
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Frequently asked questions
Is katana or gain more popular?
katana has 17,794 GitHub stars and gain has 2,017. 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 (17,794 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose gain if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.