head to head · open source
scrapy vs jsoup
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars, 11,962 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. jsoup has 11,394 stars, 2,298 forks, 4 open issues and last shipped yesterday. scrapy leads on adoption by 465% (64,388 vs 11,394 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; jsoup is written in Java under MIT. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, jsoup 20%. scrapy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (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 | jsoup | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 11K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 2.3K |
| 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 jsoup if
- You want the jsoup feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and jsoup 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 jsoup
jsoup is an open source Java library for parsing, extracting, editing, and sanitising real world HTML and XML, built for JVM developers who need browser grade parsing and XSS safe content handling inside their own applications.
read the full jsoup overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or jsoup more popular?
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars and jsoup has 11,394. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and jsoup free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and jsoup under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and jsoup?
scrapy is written in Python and jsoup in Java. 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 jsoup?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,388 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose jsoup if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.