head to head · open source
scrapy vs crawlee-python
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars, 11,962 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. crawlee-python has 9,535 stars, 807 forks, 100 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 575% (64,388 vs 9,535 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; crawlee-python is written in Python under Apache-2.0. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, crawlee-python 8%. scrapy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (crawler, crawling, python), 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| scrapy | crawlee-python | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 9.5K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 807 |
| 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-python if
- You want the crawlee-python feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and crawlee-python 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-python
Crawlee for Python is an open source, Apache 2.0 licensed web scraping and browser automation library that lets Python developers build reliable crawlers for extracting data for AI, LLM, RAG, and GPT pipelines, and it is aimed at anyone who needs to crawl sites at scale without hand writing the surrounding infrastructure.
read the full crawlee-python overview →
More in Data & Analytics
Related comparisons
More Data Extraction & Web Scraping projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Data Extraction & Web Scraping field.
Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or crawlee-python more popular?
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars and crawlee-python has 9,535. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and crawlee-python free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and crawlee-python under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and crawlee-python?
scrapy is written in Python and crawlee-python 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 crawlee-python?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,388 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose crawlee-python if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.