head to head · open source
playwright vs scrapy
playwright has 96,380 GitHub stars, 6,469 forks, 185 open issues and last shipped today. scrapy has 64,413 stars, 11,964 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. playwright leads on adoption by 50% (96,380 vs 64,413 stars). playwright is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause. playwright has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, scrapy 19%. playwright was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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
| playwright | scrapy | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 96K | ★ 64K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.5K | ⑂ 12K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick playwright if
- You weight community size — 96K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick scrapy if
- You want the scrapy feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and scrapy fits your workflow better
About playwright
Playwright is an open source, Apache 2.0 licensed TypeScript framework for web testing and browser automation that drives Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit through a single API, built for end to end testers, browser automation script writers, and AI coding agents.
read the full playwright overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is playwright or scrapy more popular?
playwright has 96,380 GitHub stars and scrapy has 64,413. playwright has the larger community by that measure.
Are playwright and scrapy free?
Both are open source. playwright is licensed under Apache-2.0 and scrapy under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between playwright and scrapy?
playwright is written in TypeScript and scrapy 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, playwright or scrapy?
Choose playwright if you want the larger community (96,380 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose scrapy if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.