The short version
- Choose Scrapy if you want precise, custom extraction logic in Python and are comfortable writing and operating spiders.
- Choose SarvCrawl if you want clean markdown from whole sites and documents, searchable, without writing a spider per site.
SarvCrawl and Scrapy, side by side
| SarvCrawl | Scrapy | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Crawl-to-knowledge-base API | Open-source Python crawling framework |
| Best for | Content you want to search — web pages and documents together | Custom crawlers with full control over extraction |
| Output | Markdown, HTML, JSON, links, images | Whatever your spiders yield; JSON, CSV and XML feed exports |
| JavaScript rendering | Yes, where a page needs it | Not built in; add a browser plugin |
| Documents | PDF, Office, EPUB, images and audio; OCR for scans | Yours to add |
| Chunking, embeddings, search | Built in (search on paid plans) | Yours to build |
| Anti-bot and proxies | Not the focus | Middleware and proxies you configure |
| Pricing | 1 billion free tokens, no card; paid plans | Free and open source |
| Hosting and licence | Hosted, or self-host: Apache-2.0 with an AGPL-3.0 engine | Self-run; BSD-3-Clause, maintained by Zyte |
| Integrations | REST, Node, Python, CLI, n8n, 21 MCP tools | Python, with a large plugin ecosystem |
Where they really differ
Scrapy is a mature, fast Python framework: you write spiders that say exactly what to follow and what to extract, and it handles scheduling, concurrency and feed exports. For precise structured extraction it is hard to beat.
Everything is code you write and run. JavaScript rendering needs a plugin, documents need their own parsers, and turning output into something an LLM can search is a separate project.
SarvCrawl trades that control for zero code per site: one crawl call returns clean markdown for every page and linked document, chunked and embedded into a knowledge base.
Using both
Keep Scrapy for sites where you need field-level extraction, and use SarvCrawl for content you want an assistant or search box to answer from.
SarvCrawl vs Scrapy: questions
Is SarvCrawl a Scrapy alternative?
For getting readable, searchable content out of sites without writing spiders, yes. For precise field-level extraction you control in code, Scrapy remains the better tool.
Does Scrapy render JavaScript?
Not by itself. You add a headless browser through a plugin. SarvCrawl renders JavaScript where a page needs it.
Do I need to write code for SarvCrawl?
One API call per crawl, or none at all through the console, the CLI or the n8n node.
Can I search Scrapy output in SarvCrawl?
Yes. Scrapy can export CSV, and an uploaded CSV is parsed, chunked and embedded into a knowledge base like any other file.