head to head · open source
scrapy vs trawl
scrapy has 64,394 GitHub stars, 11,964 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. trawl has 821 stars, 45 forks, 7 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 7,743% (64,394 vs 821 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; trawl is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, trawl 5%. scrapy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (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 | trawl | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 821 |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 45 |
| 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 trawl if
- You want the trawl feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and trawl 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 trawl
TRAWL is a self hosted, AGPL 3.0 web scraping engine written in TypeScript that solves JavaScript challenges and CAPTCHAs on behalf of other applications, and it is built for self hosters who run scraping pipelines, media automation, or agent tooling on their own hardware.
read the full trawl overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or trawl more popular?
scrapy has 64,394 GitHub stars and trawl has 821. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and trawl free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and trawl under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and trawl?
scrapy is written in Python and trawl 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 trawl?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,394 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose trawl if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.