head to head · open source
scrapy vs basketball_reference_web_scraper
scrapy has 64,394 GitHub stars, 11,964 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. basketball_reference_web_scraper has 556 stars, 133 forks, 8 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 11,482% (64,394 vs 556 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; basketball_reference_web_scraper is written in HTML under MIT. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, basketball_reference_web_scraper 24%. basketball_reference_web_scraper was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (python, web-scraping), 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.
← all 13541 open source comparisons
Side by side
| scrapy | basketball_reference_web_scraper | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 556 |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Python | HTML |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 133 |
| 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 basketball_reference_web_scraper if
- You want the basketball_reference_web_scraper feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches HTML
- You evaluated both and basketball_reference_web_scraper 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 basketball_reference_web_scraper
basketball reference web scraper is a Python package distributed on PyPI that provides an API style interface over Basketball Reference's NBA statistics, built for developers and analysts who want NBA numbers available inside their own Python code rather than copied out of web pages by hand.
read the full basketball_reference_web_scraper overview →
More in Data & Analytics
Related comparisons
More Data Extraction & Web Scraping projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Data Extraction & Web Scraping field.
Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or basketball_reference_web_scraper more popular?
scrapy has 64,394 GitHub stars and basketball_reference_web_scraper has 556. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and basketball_reference_web_scraper free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and basketball_reference_web_scraper under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and basketball_reference_web_scraper?
scrapy is written in Python and basketball_reference_web_scraper 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 basketball_reference_web_scraper?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,394 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose basketball_reference_web_scraper if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.