head to head · open source
scrapy vs crawlee
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars, 11,962 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. crawlee has 25,823 stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. scrapy leads on adoption by 149% (64,388 vs 25,823 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, crawlee 6%. crawlee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (crawler, crawling), 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 | crawlee | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 26K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 1.7K |
| 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 crawlee if
- You want the crawlee feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and crawlee 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 crawlee
Crawlee is a web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js, written in TypeScript and published on npm as the crawlee package. It lives in the JavaScript and TypeScript ecosystem, and it covers crawling and scraping end to end: fetching pages, following links, extracting data, and storing the results to disk or to the cloud. The project also has a Python counterpart, Crawlee for Python, maintained alongside it by Apify.
read the full crawlee overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or crawlee more popular?
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars and crawlee has 25,823. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and crawlee free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and crawlee under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and crawlee?
scrapy is written in Python and crawlee in TypeScript. 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 crawlee?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,388 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose crawlee if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.