head to head · open source
scrapy vs lux
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars, 11,962 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. lux has 31,686 stars, 3,312 forks, 545 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 103% (64,388 vs 31,686 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; lux is written in Go under MIT. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, lux 10%. 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 | lux | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 32K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-03-29 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 3.3K |
| 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 lux if
- You want the lux feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and lux 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 lux
Lux is a video download library and command line tool written in Go, released under the MIT license. It ships as a single lux binary that takes one or more URLs and retrieves the underlying media streams, and it also exposes the downloading logic as a Go library that other programs can embed. The project has existed for roughly nine years and lives in the Go ecosystem, distributed through go install alongside the usual operating system package managers.
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or lux more popular?
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars and lux has 31,686. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and lux free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and lux under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and lux?
scrapy is written in Python and lux 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 lux?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,388 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose lux if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.