head to head
Apify vs scrapy
scrapy is the open source alternative to Apify — web scraping and automation platform with a hosted actor marketplace. Here is the honest comparison.
Yes — scrapy is a viable free replacement for Apify. scrapy is open source under BSD-3-Clause, written in Python, with 64,438 GitHub stars, 11,968 forks and 394 open issues; it was last pushed 14 hours ago. Apify costs from $0, while self-hosting scrapy carries no licence fee — the trade is your operational time instead of a subscription. 2 other open source Apify alternatives are tracked here, led by crawlee at 25,865 stars. scrapy ranks #1 of 3 tracked open source Apify alternatives by stars. The tracked set, by adoption: crawlee (25,865 stars), crawlee-python (9,543 stars). Replacement criteria on this page: 4 reasons to move to scrapy and 3 reasons to stay on Apify.
choose scrapy if
- Your Apify bill is growing with seats or usage
- You need your data in a format and server you control
- Your compliance posture requires auditing the code that touches sensitive data
- You have (or can rent) a server and basic Docker comfort
stick with Apify if
- You need the polished onboarding and support SLAs of a commercial vendor
- Your team has zero capacity to operate software, even self-hosted-simple
- You depend on a Apify integration ecosystem that the OSS alternatives have not replicated
Side by side
| scrapy (open source) | Apify | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free (self-hosted) | Free plan available; usage metered per compute unit (about $0.2/unit on entry tiers, less on higher commitments) |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | Proprietary |
| Source code | Public, auditable | Closed |
| Self-hosting | Yes — scrapy/scrapy | Cloud only |
| Data ownership | Your server, your format | Vendor's cloud |
| Community | ★ 64K · ⑂ 12K | — |
| Built with | Python | — |
Why people look for a Apify alternative
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 →
Other open source alternatives to Apify
last updated nightly · ranking method: github stars, live-tracked
Frequently asked questions
Is scrapy a good replacement for Apify?
scrapy is an open source alternative to Apify (Web scraping and automation platform with a hosted actor marketplace). It is written in Python and licensed under BSD-3-Clause, with 64,438 GitHub stars.
Is scrapy free compared to Apify?
Yes. scrapy is open source — there is no licence fee, and you can self-host it. Apify is typically a paid subscription, so the trade-off is licence cost against the operational work of running it yourself.
How do I migrate from Apify to scrapy?
Migration effort depends on the data formats involved. Check scrapy's documentation for import options, and compare the feature table above to confirm the capabilities you depend on are covered before switching.