head to head · open source
katana vs toapi
katana has 17,531 GitHub stars, 1,185 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. toapi has 3,555 stars, 241 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 24 days ago. katana leads on adoption by 393% (17,531 vs 3,555 stars). katana is written in Go under MIT; toapi is written in Python under MIT. katana has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, toapi 7%. 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 | toapi | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 18K | ★ 3.6K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-14 | 2026-08-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.2K | ⑂ 241 |
| 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 toapi if
- You want the toapi feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and toapi 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 toapi
toapi is a Python library that turns any web page into a JSON API by declaring the fields to extract with CSS selectors, aimed at developers who need structured data from sites that never published an API.
read the full toapi overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is katana or toapi more popular?
katana has 17,531 GitHub stars and toapi has 3,555. katana has the larger community by that measure.
Are katana and toapi free?
Both are open source. katana is licensed under MIT and toapi under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between katana and toapi?
katana is written in Go and toapi 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 toapi?
Choose katana if you want the larger community (17,531 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose toapi if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.