head to head · open source
Scrapling vs webclaw
Scrapling has 81,917 GitHub stars, 8,326 forks, 6 open issues and last shipped yesterday. webclaw has 2,352 stars, 231 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Scrapling leads on adoption by 3,383% (81,917 vs 2,352 stars). Scrapling is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; webclaw is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0. Scrapling has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, webclaw 10%. 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-scraping, mcp, mcp-server), 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 | webclaw | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 82K | ★ 2.4K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Python | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.3K | ⑂ 231 |
| 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 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 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 webclaw
English 简体中文 webclaw Turn websites into clean markdown, JSON, and LLM ready context. CLI, MCP server, REST API, and SDKs for AI agents and RAG pipelines. Most web scraping tools give your agent one of two bad outputs: a blocked page, login wall, or empty app shell raw HTML full of nav, scripts, styling, ads, and duplicated boilerplate webclaw.io is the hosted web extraction API for webclaw. This repo contains the open source CLI, MCP server, extraction engine, and self hostable server. webclaw turns a URL into clean content your tools can actually use. Use it from the terminal, wire it into Claude/Cursor through …
read the full webclaw overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Scrapling or webclaw more popular?
Scrapling has 81,917 GitHub stars and webclaw has 2,352. Scrapling has the larger community by that measure.
Are Scrapling and webclaw free?
Both are open source. Scrapling is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and webclaw under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Scrapling and webclaw?
Scrapling 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, Scrapling or webclaw?
Choose Scrapling if you want the larger community (81,917 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose webclaw if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.