head to head · open source
scrapy vs spider
scrapy has 65,180 GitHub stars, 12,093 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. spider has 2,815 stars, 321 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 2,215% (65,180 vs 2,815 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 | ★ 65K | ★ 2.8K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 321 |
| 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 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
.. 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 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…
read the full spider overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or spider more popular?
scrapy has 65,180 GitHub stars and spider has 2,815. 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 (65,180 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose spider if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.