Scrapy vs Crawlee

Two crawling frameworks with the same job and different ecosystems: a mature Python engine against a modern TypeScript one that treats headless browsers as first-class citizens.

Scrapy is the mature asynchronous Python crawling framework — middlewares, pipelines, AutoThrottle and a proxy layer that scales to millions of pages. It is maintained by Zyte / open source, runs on Python 3.9+ · Linux · macOS · Windows, and starts at Free.

Crawlee is batteries-included crawler for Node and Python with automatic proxy rotation, session pooling and per-session ban tracking. It comes from Apify, runs on Node.js · Python, and starts at Free.

Scrapy wins for pure-HTML crawls at millions of pages per day and for teams whose data stack is already Python. Crawlee wins when a meaningful share of your targets need JavaScript rendering, because switching between HTTP and browser crawlers is a one-line change instead of a second architecture.

We score every scraping tool on five axes that decide real projects: how quickly a new engineer becomes productive, how far the tool scales before it needs replacing, how well it survives anti-bot systems, how good the documentation and community are, and what you get per dollar. Scrapy scores 9.1/10 overall against 9/10 for Crawlee, but the aggregate hides the trade-off that matters to you.

The clearest gaps are on ease of use and anti-bot handling. Read those two rows first; the rest are close enough that team familiarity should decide.

Throughput decides your proxy bill as much as your compute bill: a tool that needs a full browser to read a page transfers ten to thirty times more bytes than one that parses HTML directly, and residential bandwidth is priced per gigabyte.

Scrapy sustains 600 – 3,000 pages/min per worker and uses roughly ~120 MB per worker. Crawlee sustains 400 – 2,000 pages/min (HTTP mode) at roughly ~150 MB HTTP, ~500 MB browser mode. On JavaScript-heavy targets, Scrapy handles rendering like this: None (needs Playwright or a rendering API) Crawlee: Optional — switches to Playwright per request

Scrapy: BSD-licensed. Costs are infrastructure plus whatever proxy network you point it at.

Crawlee: Apache-2.0. Pairs with any proxy provider; Apify Proxy is optional, not required.

Neither list price is your real cost. Add proxy bandwidth for every tool that does not bundle it, add the compute hours for anything that drives a browser, and add the engineering time that a self-hosted stack consumes every month. A framework that is free to license routinely costs more per delivered page than a paid unlocker once residential gigabytes and failed requests are counted honestly.

Proxy strategy is where most scraping projects leak money. Scrapy expects: HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5 via downloader middleware; rotating gateways work out of the box Datacenter proxies first, rotating residential per domain once the measured block rate passes a few percent.

Crawlee expects: First-class ProxyConfiguration with rotation, tiers and automatic retirement of banned sessions Datacenter proxies first, rotating residential per domain once the measured block rate passes a few percent.

Whichever tool you pick, tier your proxy network per domain rather than globally. Start every target on datacenter IPs, promote it to rotating residential when the block rate on that specific domain passes a few percent, use static ISP IPs for anything logged in, and reserve mobile exits for app-only endpoints. Teams that apply one proxy type to every target routinely overpay by five to ten times.

Neither tool is strictly better. The lists below are the differences that changed our recommendation during testing, not feature-sheet trivia.

Scrapy wins for pure-HTML crawls at millions of pages per day and for teams whose data stack is already Python. Crawlee wins when a meaningful share of your targets need JavaScript rendering, because switching between HTTP and browser crawlers is a one-line change instead of a second architecture.

Choose Scrapy when: Your pipeline is Python, your targets are mostly static HTML, and you want the cheapest bytes-per-page in the market.

Choose Crawlee when: Your team writes TypeScript, or you need HTTP and headless browser crawling behind one API with automatic proxy rotation and session pools.

A large share of production stacks run both. Using Scrapy for the bulk of the crawl and Crawlee for the fraction of domains it handles better is almost always cheaper than forcing one tool to cover every target, because the expensive path only gets used where it earns its price.