head to head · open source
scrapy vs webmagic
scrapy has 65,180 GitHub stars, 12,093 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. webmagic has 11,670 stars, 4,085 forks, 367 open issues and last shipped 11 months ago. scrapy leads on adoption by 459% (65,180 vs 11,670 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 | ★ 65K | ★ 12K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Java |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2025-12-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 4.1K |
| 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 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
.. 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 webmagic
Readme in Chinese A scalable crawler framework. It covers the whole lifecycle of crawler: downloading, url management, content extraction and persistent. It can simplify the development of a specific crawler. Features: Simple core with high flexibility. Simple API for html extracting. Annotation with POJO to customize a crawler, no configuration. Multi thread and Distribution support. Easy to be integrated. Install: Add dependencies to your pom.xml: WebMagic use slf4j with slf4j log4j12 implementation. If you customized your slf4j implementation, please exclude slf4j log4j12. Get Started: First crawler: Write a…
read the full webmagic overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy or webmagic more popular?
scrapy has 65,180 GitHub stars and webmagic has 11,670. 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 (65,180 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.