head to head · open source
scrapy vs grab
scrapy has 65,180 GitHub stars, 12,093 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. grab has 2,462 stars, 271 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 1.1 years ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 2,547% (65,180 vs 2,462 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 | ★ 65K | ★ 2.5K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2025-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 271 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick scrapy if
- You weight community size — 65K 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
.. logo image:: :target: :alt: Scrapy :width: 480px .. version image:: :target: :alt: PyPI Version .. python version image:: :target: :alt: Supported Python Versions .. tests image:: :target: :alt: Tests .. coverage image:: :target: :alt: Coverage report .. conda image:: :target: :alt: Conda Version .. deepwiki image:: :target: :alt: Ask DeepWiki Scrapy is a web scraping framework to extract structured data from websites. It is cross platform, and requires Python 3.10+. It is maintained by Zyte (formerly Scrapinghub) and many other contributors . .. many other contributors: .. Scrapy: .. Zyte: Install with…
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…
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or grab more popular?
scrapy has 65,180 GitHub stars and grab has 2,462. 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 (65,180 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose grab if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.