head to head · open source
scrapy vs fess
scrapy has 64,394 GitHub stars, 11,964 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. fess has 1,136 stars, 175 forks, 15 open issues and last shipped yesterday. scrapy leads on adoption by 5,568% (64,394 vs 1,136 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; fess is written in Java under Apache-2.0. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, fess 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 | fess | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 1.1K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 175 |
| 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 fess if
- You want the fess feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and fess 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 fess
Fess: Enterprise Search Server Overview Fess is an enterprise search server that you can install and run on any platform with a Java runtime. It is built on OpenSearch, but prior OpenSearch knowledge is not required: Fess is configured through a browser based administration UI. A built in crawler collects documents from web sites, file systems, and data stores such as databases and CSV files. Many file formats are supported, including Microsoft Office, PDF, and ZIP archives. Fess Site Search is a free alternative to Google Site Search that you can embed in your own website. For details, see the FSS JS Generator d…
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or fess more popular?
scrapy has 64,394 GitHub stars and fess has 1,136. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and fess free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and fess under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and fess?
scrapy is written in Python and fess in Java. 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 fess?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,394 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose fess if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.