head to head · open source
scrapy vs parsera
scrapy has 65,180 GitHub stars, 12,093 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. parsera has 1,370 stars, 80 forks, 4 open issues and last shipped 11 months ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 4,658% (65,180 vs 1,370 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; parsera is written in Python under GPL-2.0. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, parsera 6%. scrapy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (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 | parsera | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 1.4K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | GPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2025-12-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 80 |
| 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 parsera if
- You want the parsera feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and parsera 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 parsera
📦 Parsera Lightweight Python library for scraping websites with LLMs. You can test it on Parsera website. Why Parsera? Because it's simple and lightweight. With interface as simple as: Table of Contents Installation Documentation Basic usage Running with Jupyter Notebook Running with CLI Running in Docker Installation Documentation Check out documentation to learn more about other features, like running custom models and playwright scripts. Basic usage First, set up PARSERA API KEY env variable (If you want to run custom LLM see Custom Models). You can do this from python with: Next, you can run a basic…
read the full parsera overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or parsera more popular?
scrapy has 65,180 GitHub stars and parsera has 1,370. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and parsera free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and parsera under GPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and parsera?
scrapy is written in Python and parsera 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 parsera?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (65,180 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose parsera if its feature set, stack or GPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.