head to head · open source
Scrapegraph-ai vs webclaw
Scrapegraph-ai has 31,140 GitHub stars, 3,141 forks, 16 open issues and last shipped 13 days ago. webclaw has 2,354 stars, 232 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Scrapegraph-ai leads on adoption by 1,223% (31,140 vs 2,354 stars). Scrapegraph-ai is written in Python under MIT; webclaw is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0. Scrapegraph-ai has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, webclaw 10%. webclaw was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 4 topic tags (ai-scraping, firecrawl-alternative, llm, markdown), 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
| Scrapegraph-ai | webclaw | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 31K | ★ 2.4K |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Python | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-07 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 232 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Scrapegraph-ai if
- You weight community size — 31K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick webclaw if
- You want the webclaw feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and webclaw fits your workflow better
About Scrapegraph-ai
ScrapeGraphAI is an open source Python library for web scraping that combines large language models with direct graph logic to build scraping pipelines. It lives in the Python ecosystem and is distributed under the MIT license, with the reference package published on PyPI as scrapegraphai . Rather than requiring a developer to hand write selectors for every page, the library accepts a natural language prompt describing the information to extract, alongside a source URL or local document, and returns structured results. It is designed around the idea expressed in its own tagline, "You Only Scrape Once," meaning th…
read the full Scrapegraph-ai overview →
About webclaw
webclaw is an AGPL 3.0 licensed Rust toolkit that turns websites into clean markdown, JSON, and LLM ready context for AI agents and RAG pipelines, shipped as a CLI, an MCP server, a REST API, and a self hostable server.
read the full webclaw overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Scrapegraph-ai or webclaw more popular?
Scrapegraph-ai has 31,140 GitHub stars and webclaw has 2,354. Scrapegraph-ai has the larger community by that measure.
Are Scrapegraph-ai and webclaw free?
Both are open source. Scrapegraph-ai is licensed under MIT and webclaw under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Scrapegraph-ai and webclaw?
Scrapegraph-ai is written in Python and webclaw in Rust. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Scrapegraph-ai or webclaw?
Choose Scrapegraph-ai if you want the larger community (31,140 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose webclaw if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.