head to head · open source
ArchiveBox vs crawlee
ArchiveBox has 28,553 GitHub stars, 1,604 forks, 160 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. crawlee has 25,858 stars, 1,677 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. ArchiveBox leads on adoption by 10% (28,553 vs 25,858 stars). ArchiveBox is written in Python under MIT; crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. ArchiveBox has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, crawlee 6%. ArchiveBox was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| ArchiveBox | crawlee | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 26K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.6K | ⑂ 1.7K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick ArchiveBox if
- You weight community size — 29K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick crawlee if
- You want the crawlee feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and crawlee fits your workflow better
About ArchiveBox
ArchiveBox is an open source, self hosted web archiving application that lets individuals and organizations preserve public and private web content in durable, readable formats while keeping control of their own data.
read the full ArchiveBox overview →
About crawlee
Crawlee is a web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js, written in TypeScript and published on npm as the crawlee package. It lives in the JavaScript and TypeScript ecosystem, and it covers crawling and scraping end to end: fetching pages, following links, extracting data, and storing the results to disk or to the cloud. The project also has a Python counterpart, Crawlee for Python, maintained alongside it by Apify.
read the full crawlee overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is ArchiveBox or crawlee more popular?
ArchiveBox has 28,553 GitHub stars and crawlee has 25,858. ArchiveBox has the larger community by that measure.
Are ArchiveBox and crawlee free?
Both are open source. ArchiveBox is licensed under MIT and crawlee under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between ArchiveBox and crawlee?
ArchiveBox is written in Python and crawlee in TypeScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, ArchiveBox or crawlee?
Choose ArchiveBox if you want the larger community (28,553 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose crawlee if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.