head to head · open source
scrapy vs DotnetSpider
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars, 11,962 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. DotnetSpider has 4,139 stars, 1,052 forks, 6 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 1,456% (64,388 vs 4,139 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; DotnetSpider is written in C# under MIT. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, DotnetSpider 25%. 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 | DotnetSpider | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 4.1K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Python | C# |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-04-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| 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 DotnetSpider if
- You want the DotnetSpider feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C#
- You evaluated both and DotnetSpider 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 DotnetSpider
DotnetSpider is an MIT licensed .NET Standard web crawling and scraping framework written in C , aimed at .NET developers who need to build high level crawlers that run either on a single machine or across a distributed cluster.
read the full DotnetSpider overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or DotnetSpider more popular?
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars and DotnetSpider has 4,139. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and DotnetSpider free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and DotnetSpider under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and DotnetSpider?
scrapy is written in Python and DotnetSpider in C#. 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 DotnetSpider?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,388 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose DotnetSpider if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.