head to head · open source
katana vs grab
katana has 17,531 GitHub stars, 1,185 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. grab has 2,463 stars, 274 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 1.0 years ago. katana leads on adoption by 612% (17,531 vs 2,463 stars). katana is written in Go under MIT; grab is written in Python under MIT. katana has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, grab 11%. 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 | grab | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 18K | ★ 2.5K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-14 | 2025-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.2K | ⑂ 274 |
| 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 grab if
- You want the grab feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and grab 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 grab
Grab is a Python web scraping framework that gives developers helpers to make network requests, scrape websites, and process the scraped content, and it is aimed at Python programmers who build crawlers and data extraction pipelines.
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Frequently asked questions
Is katana or grab more popular?
katana has 17,531 GitHub stars and grab has 2,463. katana has the larger community by that measure.
Are katana and grab free?
Both are open source. katana is licensed under MIT and grab under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between katana and grab?
katana is written in Go and grab 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 grab?
Choose katana if you want the larger community (17,531 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose grab if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.