head to head · open source
scrapy vs stagehand
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars, 11,962 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. stagehand has 24,322 stars, 1,685 forks, 376 open issues and last shipped yesterday. scrapy leads on adoption by 165% (64,388 vs 24,322 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; stagehand is written in TypeScript under MIT. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, stagehand 7%. stagehand 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 | stagehand | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 24K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 1.7K |
| 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 stagehand if
- You want the stagehand feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and stagehand 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 stagehand
Stagehand is the MIT licensed SDK for extracting data and interacting with any site on the web, available in TypeScript, Python, and Go, and aimed at developers building AI agents that need to drive a browser the way a person does rather than at engineers writing test suites.
read the full stagehand overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or stagehand more popular?
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars and stagehand has 24,322. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and stagehand free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and stagehand under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and stagehand?
scrapy is written in Python and stagehand in TypeScript. 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 stagehand?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,388 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose stagehand if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.