head to head · open source
katana vs toapi
katana has 17,794 GitHub stars, 1,215 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. toapi has 3,558 stars, 241 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. katana leads on adoption by 400% (17,794 vs 3,558 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 | 2026-11-03 | 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
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 toapi
toapi Turn any website into a JSON API — declaratively. toapi lets you point at a web page, declare the fields you want with CSS selectors, and get back a clean JSON API. No crawler to babysit, no database to maintain — pages are fetched and parsed on demand, with built‑in caching. Install Requires Python 3.10+. Quickstart Run it: Then visit and you get: How it works 1. Route — @api.route("/posts", "/news") maps your API path to a source URL. 2. Fetch — pages are fetched with requests (or a headless browser if you pass browser= ) and cached in memory. 3. Parse — each Item extracts fields with CSS selectors via…
read the full toapi overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is katana or toapi more popular?
katana has 17,794 GitHub stars and toapi has 3,558. 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 (17,794 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose toapi if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.