head to head · open source
scrapy vs httpcloak
scrapy has 64,394 GitHub stars, 11,964 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. httpcloak has 1,306 stars, 94 forks, 12 open issues and last shipped 17 days ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 4,831% (64,394 vs 1,306 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; httpcloak is written in Go under MIT. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, httpcloak 7%. scrapy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (python, web-scraping), 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 | httpcloak | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 1.3K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 94 |
| 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 httpcloak if
- You want the httpcloak feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and httpcloak 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 httpcloak
httpcloak is an MIT licensed Go HTTP client that makes outgoing requests identical to Chrome, Firefox, or Safari at the TLS, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, and header layers, and it is aimed at Go, Python, Node.js, and C developers who scrape or integrate with sites that block clients on transport fingerprint rather than on User Agent.
read the full httpcloak overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or httpcloak more popular?
scrapy has 64,394 GitHub stars and httpcloak has 1,306. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and httpcloak free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and httpcloak under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and httpcloak?
scrapy is written in Python and httpcloak in Go. 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 httpcloak?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,394 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose httpcloak if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.