head to head · open source
CloakBrowser vs anakin
CloakBrowser has 31,578 GitHub stars, 2,615 forks, 227 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. anakin has 4,394 stars, 181 forks, 82 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. CloakBrowser leads on adoption by 619% (31,578 vs 4,394 stars). CloakBrowser is written in Python under MIT; anakin is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. CloakBrowser has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, anakin 4%. CloakBrowser was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (anti-detect, playwright), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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
| CloakBrowser | anakin | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 4.4K |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-08-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.6K | ⑂ 181 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick CloakBrowser if
- You weight community size — 32K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick anakin if
- You want the anakin feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and anakin fits your workflow better
About CloakBrowser
CloakBrowser is a stealth Chromium build for Python and JavaScript teams that need browser automation to survive bot detection systems, aimed at scraping and AI agent engineers who want to replace Playwright or Puppeteer without rewriting their code.
read the full CloakBrowser overview →
About anakin
AnakinScraper OSS is an open source, self hosted web scraping API written in Go that converts any website into LLM ready markdown or structured JSON, built for teams running RAG pipelines, AI agents and large scale data extraction.
read the full anakin overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is CloakBrowser or anakin more popular?
CloakBrowser has 31,578 GitHub stars and anakin has 4,394. CloakBrowser has the larger community by that measure.
Are CloakBrowser and anakin free?
Both are open source. CloakBrowser is licensed under MIT and anakin under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between CloakBrowser and anakin?
CloakBrowser is written in Python and anakin in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, CloakBrowser or anakin?
Choose CloakBrowser if you want the larger community (31,578 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose anakin if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.