head to head · open source
scrapy vs node-crawler
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars, 11,962 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. node-crawler has 6,792 stars, 864 forks, 29 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 848% (64,388 vs 6,792 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; node-crawler is written in TypeScript under MIT. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, node-crawler 13%. 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 | node-crawler | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 6.8K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-06-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 864 |
| 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 node-crawler if
- You want the node-crawler feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and node-crawler 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 node-crawler
node crawler is a web crawler and spider library for Node.js that pairs a request queue with a server side DOM. It lives in the Node.js ecosystem and is published to npm under the package name crawler . The project is written in TypeScript and released under the MIT license, with 6,792 stars, 864 forks, and 29 open issues at the time of writing. The repository has been in development for 16 years and was last pushed on 18 June 2026. Version 2 is described as the advanced and TypeScript version of the original node crawler, and the topic list — cheerio, crawler, extract data, javascript, jquery, nodejs, spider — r…
read the full node-crawler overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or node-crawler more popular?
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars and node-crawler has 6,792. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and node-crawler free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and node-crawler under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and node-crawler?
scrapy is written in Python and node-crawler in TypeScript. 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 node-crawler?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,388 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose node-crawler if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.