head to head · open source
scrapy vs google-play-scraper
scrapy has 64,394 GitHub stars, 11,964 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. google-play-scraper has 2,966 stars, 726 forks, 117 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 2,071% (64,394 vs 2,966 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; google-play-scraper is written in JavaScript under MIT. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, google-play-scraper 24%. 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 | google-play-scraper | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 3.0K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Python | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-13 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 726 |
| 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 google-play-scraper if
- You want the google-play-scraper feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and google-play-scraper 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 google-play-scraper
google play scraper Node.js module to scrape application data from the Google Play store. ⚠️ I don't use or actively maintain this project anymore, other than reviewing community provided PRs. Expect the parser to break when Google Play's layout changes. Related projects app store scraper: a scraper with a similar interface for the iTunes app store. aso: an App Store Optimization module built on top of this library. google play api: a RESTful API to consume the data produced by this library. Installation Usage Available methods: app: Retrieves the full detail of an application. list: Retrieves a list of applicati…
read the full google-play-scraper overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or google-play-scraper more popular?
scrapy has 64,394 GitHub stars and google-play-scraper has 2,966. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and google-play-scraper free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and google-play-scraper under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and google-play-scraper?
scrapy is written in Python and google-play-scraper in JavaScript. 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 google-play-scraper?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,394 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose google-play-scraper if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.