head to head · open source
scrapy vs CloakBrowser
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars, 11,962 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. CloakBrowser has 31,528 stars, 2,612 forks, 224 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 104% (64,388 vs 31,528 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; CloakBrowser is written in Python under MIT. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, CloakBrowser 8%. scrapy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | CloakBrowser | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 32K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-13 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 2.6K |
| 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 CloakBrowser if
- You want the CloakBrowser feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and CloakBrowser 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 CloakBrowser
CloakBrowser is a stealth Chromium build for Python and JavaScript teams that need browser automation to survive bot detection systems, aimed at scraping and AI agent engineers who want to replace Playwright or Puppeteer without rewriting their code.
read the full CloakBrowser overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or CloakBrowser more popular?
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars and CloakBrowser has 31,528. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and CloakBrowser free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and CloakBrowser under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and CloakBrowser?
scrapy is written in Python and CloakBrowser 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, scrapy or CloakBrowser?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,388 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose CloakBrowser if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.