head to head · open source
scrapy vs skills
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars, 11,962 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. skills has 5,946 stars, 295 forks, 7 open issues and last shipped 25 days ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 983% (64,388 vs 5,946 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; skills is written in Python under MIT. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, skills 5%. scrapy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | skills | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 5.9K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 295 |
| 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 skills if
- You want the skills feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and skills 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 skills
BrowserAct Skills is a browser automation CLI built for AI agents, distributed as an open source Python project under the MIT license. It lives in the agent infrastructure ecosystem, alongside tooling for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and other agent clients, and it is catalogued here under Data Extraction and Web Scraping. The project has gathered roughly 5,900 stars and 293 forks since it was published about a year ago, with a small open issue count and an active last push.
read the full skills overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or skills more popular?
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars and skills has 5,946. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and skills free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and skills under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and skills?
scrapy is written in Python and skills 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 skills?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,388 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose skills if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.