head to head · open source
scrapy vs spider
scrapy has 64,394 GitHub stars, 11,964 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. spider has 2,721 stars, 302 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 2,267% (64,394 vs 2,721 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; spider is written in Rust under MIT. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, spider 11%. 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, scraping, 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 | spider | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 2.7K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 302 |
| 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 spider if
- You want the spider feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and spider 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 spider
Spider The fastest web crawler and scraper for Rust. spider.cloud · Guides · Docs · Examples · Discord Spider is a concurrency first crawling engine written in Rust. It streams pages as they arrive, renders JavaScript only on pages that need it, and scales from a single script to a distributed fleet without changing your code. The same engine runs Spider Cloud, so you can prototype locally and move to managed infrastructure with one config change. Start in the cloud The hardest part of crawling at scale isn't the code. It's the proxies, headless browsers, and constant anti bot churn. Spider Cloud runs all of that…
read the full spider overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or spider more popular?
scrapy has 64,394 GitHub stars and spider has 2,721. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and spider free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and spider under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and spider?
scrapy is written in Python and spider in Rust. 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 spider?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,394 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose spider if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.