head to head · open source
scrapy vs colly
scrapy has 65,180 GitHub stars, 12,093 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. colly has 25,572 stars, 1,859 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 18 days ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 155% (65,180 vs 25,572 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; colly is written in Go under Apache-2.0. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, colly 7%. scrapy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 4 topic tags (crawler, crawling, framework, 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 | colly | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 26K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 1.9K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick scrapy if
- You weight community size — 65K 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 colly if
- You want the colly feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and colly fits your workflow better
About scrapy
.. logo image:: :target: :alt: Scrapy :width: 480px .. version image:: :target: :alt: PyPI Version .. python version image:: :target: :alt: Supported Python Versions .. tests image:: :target: :alt: Tests .. coverage image:: :target: :alt: Coverage report .. conda image:: :target: :alt: Conda Version .. deepwiki image:: :target: :alt: Ask DeepWiki Scrapy is a web scraping framework to extract structured data from websites. It is cross platform, and requires Python 3.10+. It is maintained by Zyte (formerly Scrapinghub) and many other contributors . .. many other contributors: .. Scrapy: .. Zyte: Install with…
read the full scrapy overview →
About colly
Colly Lightning Fast and Elegant Scraping Framework for Gophers Colly provides a clean interface to write any kind of crawler/scraper/spider. With Colly you can easily extract structured data from websites, which can be used for a wide range of applications, like data mining, data processing or archiving. Sponsors NodeMaven: The most efficient proxy provider for Web Scrapping and Automation with the Highest Quality IP on the market. Why NodeMaven? 99.9% uptime ZIP Targeting IP filtering: all proxies have fraud score 1k request/sec on a single core) Manages request delays and maximum concurrency per domain…
read the full colly overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or colly more popular?
scrapy has 65,180 GitHub stars and colly has 25,572. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and colly free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and colly under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and colly?
scrapy is written in Python and colly in Go. 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 colly?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (65,180 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose colly if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.