head to head · open source
scrapy vs newspaper4k
scrapy has 64,394 GitHub stars, 11,964 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. newspaper4k has 1,139 stars, 116 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped 25 days ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 5,554% (64,394 vs 1,139 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; newspaper4k is written in Python under MIT. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, newspaper4k 10%. scrapy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (crawler, python, 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 | newspaper4k | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 1.1K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 116 |
| 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 newspaper4k if
- You want the newspaper4k feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and newspaper4k 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 newspaper4k
Newspaper4k: Article Scraping & Curation, a continuation of the beloved newspaper3k by codelucas Newspaper4k Project grew from a fork of the well known newspaper3k by codelucas which was not updated since September 2020. The initial goal of this fork was to keep the project alive and to add new features and fix bugs. As of version 0.9.3 there are many new features and improvements that make Newspaper4k a great tool for article scraping and curation. To make the migration to Newspaper4k easier, all the classes and methods from the original project were kept and the new features were added on top of them. All API c…
read the full newspaper4k overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or newspaper4k more popular?
scrapy has 64,394 GitHub stars and newspaper4k has 1,139. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and newspaper4k free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and newspaper4k under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and newspaper4k?
scrapy is written in Python and newspaper4k 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 newspaper4k?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,394 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose newspaper4k if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.