head to head · open source
scrapy vs node-crawler
scrapy has 65,180 GitHub stars, 12,093 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. node-crawler has 6,796 stars, 862 forks, 29 open issues and last shipped 5 months ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 859% (65,180 vs 6,796 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| scrapy | node-crawler | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 6.8K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-06-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 862 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick scrapy if
- You weight community size — 65K 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
.. logo image:: :target: :alt: Scrapy :width: 480px .. version image:: :target: :alt: PyPI Version .. python version image:: :target: :alt: Supported Python Versions .. tests image:: :target: :alt: Tests .. coverage image:: :target: :alt: Coverage report .. conda image:: :target: :alt: Conda Version .. deepwiki image:: :target: :alt: Ask DeepWiki Scrapy is a web scraping framework to extract structured data from websites. It is cross platform, and requires Python 3.10+. It is maintained by Zyte (formerly Scrapinghub) and many other contributors . .. many other contributors: .. Scrapy: .. Zyte: Install with…
read the full scrapy overview →
About node-crawler
[![NPM download][download image]][download url] [![Package Quality][quality image]][quality url] [quality image]: [quality url]: [download image]: [download url]: Crawler v2 : Advanced and Typescript version of node crawler Features: Server side DOM & automatic jQuery insertion with Cheerio (default), Configurable pool size and retries, Control rate limit, Priority queue of requests, let crawler deal for you with charset detection and conversion, If you have prior experience with Crawler v1, for fast migration, please proceed to the section Differences and Breaking Changes. Use with AI agents This package ships…
read the full node-crawler overview →
More in Data & Analytics
Related comparisons
More Data Extraction & Web Scraping projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Data Extraction & Web Scraping field.
Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or node-crawler more popular?
scrapy has 65,180 GitHub stars and node-crawler has 6,796. 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 (65,180 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.