head to head · open source
scrapy vs PHPScraper
scrapy has 64,394 GitHub stars, 11,964 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. PHPScraper has 588 stars, 75 forks, 28 open issues and last shipped 11 days ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 10,851% (64,394 vs 588 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; PHPScraper is written in PHP under GPL-3.0. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, PHPScraper 13%. scrapy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (scraping, web-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 | PHPScraper | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 588 |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Python | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-08 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 75 |
| 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 PHPScraper if
- You want the PHPScraper feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and PHPScraper 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 PHPScraper
PHPScraper is a GPL 3.0 PHP web utility for developers who need to extract structured information such as titles, metadata, social tags, headings, lists, images, links, keywords, and downloadable assets from websites without writing selectors or manually preparing the extracted data.
read the full PHPScraper overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or PHPScraper more popular?
scrapy has 64,394 GitHub stars and PHPScraper has 588. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and PHPScraper free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and PHPScraper under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and PHPScraper?
scrapy is written in Python and PHPScraper in PHP. 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 PHPScraper?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,394 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose PHPScraper if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.