head to head · open source
scrapy vs grab
scrapy has 64,394 GitHub stars, 11,964 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. grab has 2,461 stars, 274 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 12 months ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 2,517% (64,394 vs 2,461 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; grab is written in Python under MIT. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, grab 11%. scrapy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 5 topic tags (crawler, crawling, framework, 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.
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Side by side
| scrapy | grab | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 2.5K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2025-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 274 |
| 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 grab if
- You want the grab feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and grab 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 grab
Grab Update (2025 year) Since 2018 (which is the year of most recent Grab release) I have tried to do large refactoring of code base of Grab library. Which ended up with semi working product which nobody uses, including me. I have decided to reset all project files to the state of most recent pypi release 0.6.41 dated by june 2018. At least, now the code base corresponds to live version of the product which is being used by some people, according to pypi stats. I've updated Grab code base and code base of its dependencies to be compatible with Python 2.7 and Python 3.13 (and, hopefully, all py versions between th…
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or grab more popular?
scrapy has 64,394 GitHub stars and grab has 2,461. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and grab free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and grab under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and grab?
scrapy is written in Python and grab 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 grab?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,394 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose grab if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.