head to head · open source
scrapy vs trafilatura
scrapy has 65,180 GitHub stars, 12,093 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. trafilatura has 7,061 stars, 488 forks, 60 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 823% (65,180 vs 7,061 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; trafilatura is written in Python under Apache-2.0. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, trafilatura 7%. scrapy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (crawler), 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| scrapy | trafilatura | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 7.1K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 488 |
| 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 trafilatura if
- You want the trafilatura feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and trafilatura 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 trafilatura
Trafilatura: Discover Web Content, Extract Text and Metadata Introduction Trafilatura is a comprehensive Python package and command line tool designed to gather text from the Web and turn raw HTML into structured, meaningful data . It includes all necessary discovery and text processing components to perform web crawling, downloads, scraping, and extraction of main texts, metadata and comments. It aims at staying handy and modular : no database is required, the output can be converted to commonly used formats. Going from raw HTML to essential parts, it focuses on the actual content , avoids noise caused by…
read the full trafilatura overview →
More in Data & Analytics
Related comparisons
More Data Extraction & Web Scraping projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Data Extraction & Web Scraping field.
Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or trafilatura more popular?
scrapy has 65,180 GitHub stars and trafilatura has 7,061. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and trafilatura free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and trafilatura under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and trafilatura?
scrapy is written in Python and trafilatura 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 trafilatura?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (65,180 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose trafilatura if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.