head to head · open source
scrapy vs brightdata-mcp
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars, 11,962 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. brightdata-mcp has 2,648 stars, 328 forks, 40 open issues and last shipped yesterday. scrapy leads on adoption by 2,332% (64,388 vs 2,648 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; brightdata-mcp is written in JavaScript under MIT. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, brightdata-mcp 12%. scrapy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (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.
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Side by side
| scrapy | brightdata-mcp | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 2.6K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Python | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 328 |
| 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 brightdata-mcp if
- You want the brightdata-mcp feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and brightdata-mcp 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 brightdata-mcp
brightdata mcp is a Model Context Protocol server in JavaScript under the MIT license. It exposes web search, page scraping, structured data extraction, browser automation, LLM response collection, and package registry data to AI agents, coding agents, chat assistants, and other MCP compatible clients. It lives in the MCP ecosystem.
read the full brightdata-mcp overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or brightdata-mcp more popular?
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars and brightdata-mcp has 2,648. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and brightdata-mcp free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and brightdata-mcp under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and brightdata-mcp?
scrapy is written in Python and brightdata-mcp in JavaScript. 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 brightdata-mcp?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,388 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose brightdata-mcp if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.