head to head · open source
scrapy vs gain
scrapy has 64,394 GitHub stars, 11,964 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. gain has 2,018 stars, 204 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 3,091% (64,394 vs 2,018 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; gain is written in Python under MIT. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, gain 10%. scrapy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (crawler, python), 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| scrapy | gain | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 2.0K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 204 |
| 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 gain if
- You want the gain feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and gain 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 gain
gain Async web crawling framework for everyone. Built on asyncio , aiohttp , and lxml / pyquery . Declare items and parsers; gain handles the concurrency, retries, and persistence. Install Linux users can opt into uvloop for an extra speed bump: Requires Python 3.10+. Quickstart Run it: XPath parsers How it works 1. Spider kicks off from start url under a concurrency budget. 2. Parsers either follow (one argument) — discovering more URLs to queue — or extract (two arguments) — instantiating an Item from each matching page. 3. Items use Css / Xpath / Regex selectors to pull fields out of HTML. 4. save() is your as…
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 gain more popular?
scrapy has 64,394 GitHub stars and gain has 2,018. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and gain free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and gain under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and gain?
scrapy is written in Python and gain 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 gain?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,394 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose gain if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.