head to head · open source
scrapy vs katana
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars, 11,962 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. katana has 17,518 stars, 1,183 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 268% (64,388 vs 17,518 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; katana is written in Go under MIT. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, katana 7%. scrapy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (crawler, hacktoberfest), 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
| scrapy | katana | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 18K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick scrapy if
- You weight community size — 64K stars and counting
- You want the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick katana if
- You want the katana feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and katana fits your workflow better
About scrapy
Scrapy is a web scraping framework written in Python, distributed under the BSD 3 Clause license, and described in its own README as a tool to extract structured data from websites. It is cross platform and requires Python 3.10 or newer. The project is maintained by Zyte, formerly known as Scrapinghub, together with a broader group of contributors, and it lives in the Python ecosystem as an installable library rather than a hosted service. Its repository is roughly seventeen years old, which places it among the longer running projects in the web scraping space.
read the full scrapy overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or katana more popular?
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars and katana has 17,518. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and katana free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and katana under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and katana?
scrapy is written in Python and katana in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, scrapy or katana?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,388 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose katana if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.