crawlee vs scrapy
Apify's web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js/TypeScript — HTTP and headless-browser crawlers with human-like anti-blocking defaults, queues, storage and proxies. — versus — The veteran Python web crawling framework: spiders, middlewares, pipelines and battle-tested scheduling — 60k+ stars and still the reference architecture for structured scraping.
Same job — a production crawling framework. Scrapy is the fifteen-year Python veteran with the deepest ecosystem; Crawlee is TypeScript-native with headless-browser switching and anti-blocking as defaults rather than plugins.
| crawlee | scrapy | |
|---|---|---|
| Stars | 25k | 63k |
| Forks | 1.6k | 12k |
| Language | TypeScript | Python |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Last activity | today | 3 days ago |
| Topics | web | web |
| Curated connections | 3 | 2 |
crawlee — the curator's take
The TypeScript-native answer to production crawling: one API switches between cheap HTTP crawling and Playwright/Puppeteer when pages need a real browser, with anti-blocking fingerprints, request queues, proxy rotation and storage built in rather than bolted on. Reach for it when your stack is Node and the target fights back. NOT the pick for Python teams (its Python port is younger — Scrapy owns that ground), and mind the gravity: it's built by Apify and nudges toward their platform, though it runs fine standalone.
scrapy — the curator's take
Fifteen-plus years of production hardening in one framework: spiders declare what to extract, middlewares/pipelines handle retries, throttling, dedup and export, and the ecosystem has an answer for everything. For large structured crawls in Python it's still the default. NOT a browser — JS-heavy or anti-bot-protected sites need Playwright bolted on or a different tool (Scrapling's stealth fetchers, Crawlee's browser mode), and the framework's inversion of control feels heavy when you just need one page: for that, requests + a parser beats a Scrapy project.