head to head · open source
scrapy vs crawlab
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars, 11,962 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. crawlab has 12,273 stars, 1,890 forks, 166 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 425% (64,388 vs 12,273 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; crawlab is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, crawlab 15%. scrapy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (crawler), 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 | crawlab | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 12K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-02-10 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 1.9K |
| 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 crawlab if
- You want the crawlab feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and crawlab 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 crawlab
Crawlab is a BSD 3 Clause licensed, Go based distributed web crawler admin platform that manages spiders regardless of the language or framework they are written in, built for teams that run many crawlers and need one place to schedule, monitor, and inspect them.
read the full crawlab overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or crawlab more popular?
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars and crawlab has 12,273. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and crawlab free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and crawlab under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and crawlab?
scrapy is written in Python and crawlab 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 crawlab?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,388 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose crawlab if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.