newspaper vs lassie
Python web content extraction libraries compared
newspaper and lassie both help Python developers extract structured content from web pages. newspaper focuses on discovering news articles and extracting their text and metadata, while lassie retrieves general page details such as descriptions, images, and video embeds.

newspaper: Extract News Articles and Metadata in Python
Newspaper3k is a Python library for crawling news sites and extracting article text, metadata, images, keywords, and summaries. It suits developers building news aggregation, monitoring, or text-processing workflows.

lassie: Retrieve Structured Content from Websites
Lassie is a Python library that fetches basic content and metadata from web pages. It suits applications that need page titles, descriptions, images, video details, or other metadata without building their own extraction flow.
| newspaper | lassie | |
|---|---|---|
| Language | Python | HTML |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Stars | 15.2k | 629 |
| Forks | 2.1k | 49 |
| Last analyzed | Oct 3, 2026 | Oct 3, 2026 |
Key differences
- newspaper can crawl known publications to find article and category URLs; lassie fetches content from a supplied URL.
- newspaper extracts article text, authors, publication dates, keywords, and summaries; lassie focuses on page metadata, images, video details, keywords, and locale.
- newspaper can process HTML already fetched by an application and supports multiple languages; lassie provides a URL-based retrieval interface.
- newspaper is listed with Python as its language, while lassie is listed with HTML.
- Both projects use the MIT license, but newspaper has 15.2k stars and 2.1k forks, compared with lassie's 629 stars and 49 forks.
- newspaper's considerations mention possible system-library and NLP-corpus requirements; lassie's considerations advise checking its documentation and package state before a new production integration.
Choose newspaper if you…
- need to discover article and category links across known news publications.
- want article text, authors, dates, images, keywords, or summaries for news analysis.
- need to extract readable text from HTML your application has already fetched.
Choose lassie if you…
- need basic metadata and images for link previews or submitted URLs.
- want to retrieve video embed details alongside page information.
- prefer a Python interface for fetching structured content from a supplied URL.
Compare the numbers side by side, or add more projects
This comparison is generated with AI from the OSRepos analyses of both projects. Always check each project's repository and documentation before choosing.