head to head · open source
scrapy vs scrapecraft
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars, 11,962 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. scrapecraft has 698 stars, 112 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 9 months ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 9,125% (64,388 vs 698 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; scrapecraft is written in Python under MIT. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, scrapecraft 16%. scrapy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (hacktoberfest, python, 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 | scrapecraft | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 698 |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2025-12-26 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 112 |
| 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 scrapecraft if
- You want the scrapecraft feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and scrapecraft 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 scrapecraft
ScrapeCraft is an MIT licensed, web based scraping editor — described in its README as similar to Cursor but specialized for web scraping — that lets users build, test, and deploy scrapers through a visual workflow builder and natural language AI assistance, and it is aimed at developers and data teams who already work in Python or TypeScript and want extraction pipelines assembled rather than hand coded.
read the full scrapecraft overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or scrapecraft more popular?
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars and scrapecraft has 698. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and scrapecraft free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and scrapecraft under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and scrapecraft?
scrapy is written in Python and scrapecraft 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 scrapecraft?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,388 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose scrapecraft if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.