head to head · open source
scrapy vs freeproxy
scrapy has 64,394 GitHub stars, 11,964 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. freeproxy has 546 stars, 96 forks, 2 open issues and last shipped yesterday. scrapy leads on adoption by 11,694% (64,394 vs 546 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; freeproxy is written in Python under Apache-2.0. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, freeproxy 18%. freeproxy 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 | freeproxy | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 546 |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 96 |
| 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 freeproxy if
- You want the freeproxy 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 freeproxy 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 freeproxy
FreeProxy is an Apache 2.0 Python project that continuously discovers, verifies, and republishes free HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS4, and SOCKS5 proxies scraped from dozens of public share sources, aimed at developers running crawlers, spiders, and data analysis pipelines who need a changing pool of proxies without paying a provider.
read the full freeproxy overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or freeproxy more popular?
scrapy has 64,394 GitHub stars and freeproxy has 546. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and freeproxy free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and freeproxy under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and freeproxy?
scrapy is written in Python and freeproxy 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 freeproxy?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,394 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose freeproxy if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.