head to head · open source
changedetection.io vs crawlee
changedetection.io has 34,295 GitHub stars, 2,063 forks, 385 open issues and last shipped yesterday. crawlee has 25,823 stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. changedetection.io leads on adoption by 33% (34,295 vs 25,823 stars). changedetection.io is written in Python under Apache-2.0; crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. changedetection.io has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, crawlee 6%. changedetection.io 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
| changedetection.io | crawlee | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 34K | ★ 26K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.1K | ⑂ 1.7K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick changedetection.io if
- You weight community size — 34K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 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 changedetection.io
changedetection.io is an open source website change detection and web page monitoring tool written in Python and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It watches URLs, detects when their content changes, and sends alerts through channels such as Discord, Email, Slack, Telegram, and Webhook. The project lives in the Data & Analytics / Data Extraction & Web Scraping ecosystem, carries more than 34,000 stars and 2,000 forks on GitHub, and has been developed for roughly six years. It is designed to be self hosted, and the same codebase also backs a hosted subscription service offered by the maintainers.…
read the full changedetection.io 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 changedetection.io or crawlee more popular?
changedetection.io has 34,295 GitHub stars and crawlee has 25,823. changedetection.io has the larger community by that measure.
Are changedetection.io and crawlee free?
Both are open source. changedetection.io is licensed under Apache-2.0 and crawlee under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between changedetection.io and crawlee?
changedetection.io 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, changedetection.io or crawlee?
Choose changedetection.io if you want the larger community (34,295 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose crawlee if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.