head to head · open source
scrapy vs toapi
scrapy has 64,394 GitHub stars, 11,964 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. toapi has 3,555 stars, 241 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 22 days ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 1,711% (64,394 vs 3,555 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; toapi is written in Python under MIT. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, toapi 7%. scrapy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (crawler, 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 | toapi | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 3.6K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 241 |
| 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 toapi if
- You want the toapi feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and toapi 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 toapi
toapi Turn any website into a JSON API — declaratively. toapi lets you point at a web page, declare the fields you want with CSS selectors, and get back a clean JSON API. No crawler to babysit, no database to maintain — pages are fetched and parsed on demand, with built‑in caching. Install Requires Python 3.10+. Quickstart Run it: Then visit and you get: How it works 1. Route — @api.route("/posts", "/news") maps your API path to a source URL. 2. Fetch — pages are fetched with requests (or a headless browser if you pass browser= ) and cached in memory. 3. Parse — each Item extracts fields with CSS selectors via ht…
read the full toapi overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or toapi more popular?
scrapy has 64,394 GitHub stars and toapi has 3,555. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and toapi free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and toapi under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and toapi?
scrapy is written in Python and toapi 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 toapi?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,394 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose toapi if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.