head to head · open source
scrapy vs webmagic
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars, 11,962 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. webmagic has 11,676 stars, 4,100 forks, 367 open issues and last shipped 9 months ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 451% (64,388 vs 11,676 stars). scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause; webmagic is written in Java under Apache-2.0. scrapy has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, webmagic 35%. scrapy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (crawler, framework, 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 | webmagic | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 12K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2025-12-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 4.1K |
| 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 webmagic if
- You want the webmagic feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and webmagic 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 webmagic
WebMagic is an open source web crawler framework written in Java and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It lives in the Java ecosystem and is distributed through Maven Central as the us.codecraft:webmagic core and us.codecraft:webmagic extension artifacts. The project describes itself as a scalable crawler framework that covers the whole lifecycle of a crawler: downloading, URL management, content extraction, and persistence. Its architecture was written with reference to Scrapy, the Python crawler framework, and it has been maintained for roughly thirteen years, with the most recent push in December 2025.…
read the full webmagic overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or webmagic more popular?
scrapy has 64,388 GitHub stars and webmagic has 11,676. scrapy has the larger community by that measure.
Are scrapy and webmagic free?
Both are open source. scrapy is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and webmagic under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between scrapy and webmagic?
scrapy is written in Python and webmagic in Java. 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 webmagic?
Choose scrapy if you want the larger community (64,388 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose webmagic if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.