head to head · open source
scrapy vs PHPScraper
scrapy has 65,180 GitHub stars, 12,093 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. PHPScraper has 588 stars, 74 forks, 28 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 10,985% (65,180 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 1 topic tag (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 | ★ 65K | ★ 588 |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Python | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-09-08 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 74 |
| 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 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
.. 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 PHPScraper
For full documentation, visit phpscraper.de . PHPScraper is a versatile web utility for PHP. Its primary objective is to streamline the process of extracting information from websites, allowing you to focus on accomplishing tasks without getting caught up in the complexities of selectors, data structure preparation, and conversion. Under the hood, it uses BrowserKit (formerly Goutte) to access the web League/URI to process URLs donatello za/rake php plus to extract and analyze keywords See composer.json for more details. :timer clock: PHPScraper in 5 Minutes explained Here are a few impressions of the way the…
read the full PHPScraper overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or PHPScraper more popular?
scrapy has 65,180 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 (65,180 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.