head to head · open source
scrapy vs selectolax
scrapy has 65,180 GitHub stars, 12,093 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. selectolax has 1,703 stars, 95 forks, 10 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 3,727% (65,180 vs 1,703 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; selectolax is written in Python under MIT. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, selectolax 6%. scrapy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (crawler, 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 | selectolax | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 1.7K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 95 |
| 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 selectolax if
- You want the selectolax feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and selectolax 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 selectolax
A fast HTML5 parser with CSS selectors, written in Cython, using Modest and Lexbor engines. Installation From PyPI using pip: If installation fails due to compilation errors, you may need to install Cython: This usually happens when you try to install an outdated version of selectolax on a newer version of Python. Development version from GitHub: How to compile selectolax while developing: Basic examples Here are some basic examples to get you started with selectolax: Parsing HTML and extracting text: Using advanced CSS selectors Using lexbor contains CSS pseudo class to match text More examples Available…
read the full selectolax overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or selectolax more popular?
scrapy has 65,180 GitHub stars and selectolax has 1,703. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and selectolax free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and selectolax under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and selectolax?
scrapy is written in Python and selectolax 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 selectolax?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (65,180 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose selectolax if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.