head to head · open source
Scrapling vs reader
Scrapling has 92,628 GitHub stars, 9,759 forks, 6 open issues and last shipped yesterday. reader has 561 stars, 41 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped 28 days ago. Scrapling leads on adoption by 16,411% (92,628 vs 561 stars). Scrapling is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; reader is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. Scrapling has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, reader 7%. Scrapling was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (ai, crawler, data-extraction), 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 | reader | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 93K | ★ 561 |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.8K | ⑂ 41 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Scrapling if
- You weight community size — 93K 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 reader if
- You want the reader feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and reader fits your workflow better
About Scrapling
Effortless Web Scraping for the Modern Web Selection methods · Fetchers · Spiders · Proxy Rotation · CLI · MCP Scrapling is an adaptive Web Scraping framework that handles everything from a single request to a full scale crawl. Its parser learns from website changes and automatically relocates your elements when pages update. Its fetchers bypass anti bot systems like Cloudflare Turnstile out of the box. And its spider framework lets you scale up to concurrent, multi session crawls with pause/resume, automatic proxy rotation, and a crawl speed that adapts to how fast each…
read the full Scrapling overview →
About reader
Reader Open source web infrastructure for AI. Access the web without the complexity. Docs · Examples · Discord The Problem Building agents that need web access is frustrating. You piece together Puppeteer, add stealth plugins, fight Cloudflare, manage proxies and it still breaks in production. Because production grade web scraping isn't about rendering a page and converting HTML to markdown. It's about everything underneath: I built Reader , a production grade web scraping engine on top of Playwright, with stealth and anti detection built in from the ground up. The Solution Three primitives. That's it. All the…
read the full reader overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Scrapling or reader more popular?
Scrapling has 92,628 GitHub stars and reader has 561. Scrapling has the larger community by that measure.
Are Scrapling and reader free?
Both are open source. Scrapling is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and reader under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Scrapling and reader?
Scrapling is written in Python and reader in TypeScript. 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 reader?
Choose Scrapling if you want the larger community (92,628 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose reader if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.