head to head · open source
scrapy vs pdf_oxide
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars, 11,962 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. pdf_oxide has 1,033 stars, 129 forks, 322 open issues and last shipped yesterday. scrapy leads on adoption by 6,133% (64,388 vs 1,033 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; pdf_oxide is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, pdf_oxide 12%. scrapy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | pdf_oxide | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 1.0K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 129 |
| 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 pdf_oxide if
- You want the pdf_oxide feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and pdf_oxide 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 pdf_oxide
PDFOxide is a Rust core PDF toolkit with bindings for nineteen additional languages, plus a command line tool and an MCP server, aimed at developers and data teams that need fast, permissively licensed text extraction, image extraction, markdown conversion, and PDF creation and editing.
read the full pdf_oxide overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or pdf_oxide more popular?
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars and pdf_oxide has 1,033. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and pdf_oxide free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and pdf_oxide under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and pdf_oxide?
scrapy is written in Python and pdf_oxide in Rust. 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 pdf_oxide?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,388 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose pdf_oxide if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.