head to head · open source
katana vs ruia
katana has 17,579 GitHub stars, 1,188 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. ruia has 1,737 stars, 185 forks, 9 open issues and last shipped 10 days ago. katana leads on adoption by 912% (17,579 vs 1,737 stars). katana is written in Go under MIT; ruia is written in Python under Apache-2.0. katana has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, ruia 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 | ruia | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 18K | ★ 1.7K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-25 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.2K | ⑂ 185 |
| 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 ruia if
- You want the ruia feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and ruia 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 ruia
Ruia is an asynchronous web scraping micro framework for Python 3.6 and above, built on asyncio and aiohttp , and intended for Python developers who want to declare what a crawler should collect and let the framework handle concurrent requests.
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Frequently asked questions
Is katana or ruia more popular?
katana has 17,579 GitHub stars and ruia has 1,737. katana has the larger community by that measure.
Are katana and ruia free?
Both are open source. katana is licensed under MIT and ruia under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between katana and ruia?
katana is written in Go and ruia 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 ruia?
Choose katana if you want the larger community (17,579 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose ruia if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.