head to head · open source
Scrapling vs grab
Scrapling has 81,917 GitHub stars, 8,326 forks, 6 open issues and last shipped yesterday. grab has 2,461 stars, 274 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 12 months ago. Scrapling leads on adoption by 3,229% (81,917 vs 2,461 stars). Scrapling is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; grab is written in Python under MIT. Scrapling has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, grab 11%. Scrapling was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (crawler, crawling, python), 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
| Scrapling | grab | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 82K | ★ 2.5K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2025-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.3K | ⑂ 274 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Scrapling if
- You weight community size — 82K 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 grab if
- You want the grab feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and grab fits your workflow better
About Scrapling
Scrapling is an adaptive Python web scraping framework for developers, data teams, and regular users who need anything from a single request to a full scale crawl without rewriting selectors every time a site changes.
read the full Scrapling overview →
About grab
Grab Update (2025 year) Since 2018 (which is the year of most recent Grab release) I have tried to do large refactoring of code base of Grab library. Which ended up with semi working product which nobody uses, including me. I have decided to reset all project files to the state of most recent pypi release 0.6.41 dated by june 2018. At least, now the code base corresponds to live version of the product which is being used by some people, according to pypi stats. I've updated Grab code base and code base of its dependencies to be compatible with Python 2.7 and Python 3.13 (and, hopefully, all py versions between th…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Scrapling or grab more popular?
Scrapling has 81,917 GitHub stars and grab has 2,461. Scrapling has the larger community by that measure.
Are Scrapling and grab free?
Both are open source. Scrapling is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and grab under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Scrapling and grab?
Scrapling is written in Python and grab 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, Scrapling or grab?
Choose Scrapling if you want the larger community (81,917 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose grab if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.