head to head · open source
scrapy vs selenium
scrapy has 64,413 GitHub stars, 11,964 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. selenium has 34,502 stars, 8,717 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped today. scrapy leads on adoption by 87% (64,413 vs 34,502 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; selenium is written in Java under Apache-2.0. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, selenium 25%. selenium was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (python), 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 | selenium | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 35K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 8.7K |
| 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 selenium if
- You want the selenium feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and selenium 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 selenium
Selenium is a browser automation framework and ecosystem — an umbrella project providing infrastructure for the W3C WebDriver specification, a platform and language neutral coding interface for driving all major web browsers — aimed at developers and quality engineers who automate browser behaviour from Java, .NET, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, or Rust.
read the full selenium overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or selenium more popular?
scrapy has 64,413 GitHub stars and selenium has 34,502. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and selenium free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and selenium under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and selenium?
scrapy is written in Python and selenium in Java. 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 selenium?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,413 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose selenium if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.