head to head · open source
scrapy vs SeleniumBase
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars, 11,962 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. SeleniumBase has 13,023 stars, 1,583 forks, 14 open issues and last shipped yesterday. scrapy leads on adoption by 394% (64,388 vs 13,023 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; SeleniumBase is written in Python under MIT. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, SeleniumBase 12%. SeleniumBase 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 | SeleniumBase | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 13K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 1.6K |
| 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 SeleniumBase if
- You want the SeleniumBase feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and SeleniumBase 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 SeleniumBase
SeleniumBase is an MIT licensed Python framework that combines browser automation, end to end testing, web crawling, scraping, and bot detection bypass in one package, built for QA engineers, test automation developers, and Python scraper authors.
read the full SeleniumBase overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or SeleniumBase more popular?
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars and SeleniumBase has 13,023. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and SeleniumBase free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and SeleniumBase under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and SeleniumBase?
scrapy is written in Python and SeleniumBase 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 SeleniumBase?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,388 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose SeleniumBase if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.