head to head · open source
scrapy vs reader
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars, 11,962 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. reader has 560 stars, 40 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 11,398% (64,388 vs 560 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; reader is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, reader 7%. 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.
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Side by side
| scrapy | reader | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 560 |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 40 |
| 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 reader if
- You want the reader feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and reader 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 reader
Reader is an Apache 2.0 TypeScript library and hosted service that scrapes, crawls, and drives stealth headless browsers to deliver clean Markdown to AI agents, built for developers who need production grade web access without assembling Puppeteer, stealth plugins, and proxy infrastructure by hand.
read the full reader overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or reader more popular?
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars and reader has 560. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and reader free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and reader under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and reader?
scrapy is written in Python and reader 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 reader?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,388 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose reader if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.