head to head · open source
scrapy vs webclaw
scrapy has 65,180 GitHub stars, 12,093 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. webclaw has 2,422 stars, 240 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped yesterday. scrapy leads on adoption by 2,591% (65,180 vs 2,422 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; webclaw is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, webclaw 10%. scrapy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | webclaw | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 2.4K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Python | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 240 |
| 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 webclaw if
- You want the webclaw feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and webclaw 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 webclaw
English 简体中文 webclaw Turn websites into clean markdown, JSON, and LLM ready context. CLI, MCP server, REST API, and SDKs for AI agents and RAG pipelines. Most web scraping tools give your agent one of two bad outputs: a blocked page, login wall, or empty app shell raw HTML full of nav, scripts, styling, ads, and duplicated boilerplate webclaw.io is the hosted web extraction API for webclaw. This repo contains the open source CLI, MCP server, extraction engine, and self hostable server. webclaw turns a URL into clean content your tools can actually use. Use it from the terminal, wire it into Claude/Cursor through…
read the full webclaw 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 webclaw more popular?
scrapy has 65,180 GitHub stars and webclaw has 2,422. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and webclaw free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and webclaw under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and webclaw?
scrapy is written in Python and webclaw 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 webclaw?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (65,180 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose webclaw if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.