head to head · open source
scrapy vs pydoll
scrapy has 64,413 GitHub stars, 11,964 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. pydoll has 7,090 stars, 406 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 809% (64,413 vs 7,090 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; pydoll is written in HTML under MIT. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, pydoll 6%. scrapy 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
| scrapy | pydoll | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 7.1K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Python | HTML |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 406 |
| 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 pydoll if
- You want the pydoll feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches HTML
- You evaluated both and pydoll 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 pydoll
Pydoll is a stealth first Python library that automates Chromium based browsers directly over the DevTools Protocol, without a WebDriver, for developers who scrape, test, or automate sites that block ordinary bots.
read the full pydoll overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or pydoll more popular?
scrapy has 64,413 GitHub stars and pydoll has 7,090. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and pydoll free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and pydoll under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and pydoll?
scrapy is written in Python and pydoll in HTML. 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 pydoll?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,413 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose pydoll if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.