head to head · open source
scrapy vs firecrawl-mcp-server
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars, 11,962 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. firecrawl-mcp-server has 7,477 stars, 888 forks, 136 open issues and last shipped yesterday. scrapy leads on adoption by 761% (64,388 vs 7,477 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; firecrawl-mcp-server is written in TypeScript under MIT. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, firecrawl-mcp-server 12%. firecrawl-mcp-server 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| scrapy | firecrawl-mcp-server | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 7.5K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 888 |
| 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 firecrawl-mcp-server if
- You want the firecrawl-mcp-server feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and firecrawl-mcp-server 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 firecrawl-mcp-server
Firecrawl MCP Server is the official Model Context Protocol server that gives Cursor, Claude, and other MCP compatible AI clients search, scraping, and page interaction against the live web.
read the full firecrawl-mcp-server 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 firecrawl-mcp-server more popular?
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars and firecrawl-mcp-server has 7,477. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and firecrawl-mcp-server free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and firecrawl-mcp-server under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and firecrawl-mcp-server?
scrapy is written in Python and firecrawl-mcp-server 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 firecrawl-mcp-server?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,388 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose firecrawl-mcp-server if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.