head to head · open source
scrapy vs ferret
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars, 11,962 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. ferret has 6,011 stars, 324 forks, 12 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 971% (64,388 vs 6,011 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; ferret is written in Go under Apache-2.0. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, ferret 5%. scrapy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | ferret | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 6.0K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 324 |
| 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 ferret if
- You want the ferret 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 ferret 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 ferret
Ferret is a declarative data automation language and embeddable Go runtime for structured extraction workflows, built for Go developers who need to query, transform, and synchronize structured data across browsers, APIs, databases, and documents from inside their own applications.
read the full ferret overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or ferret more popular?
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars and ferret has 6,011. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and ferret free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and ferret under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and ferret?
scrapy is written in Python and ferret 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 ferret?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,388 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose ferret if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.