head to head · open source
CloakBrowser vs crawlab
CloakBrowser has 31,578 GitHub stars, 2,615 forks, 227 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. crawlab has 12,273 stars, 1,889 forks, 166 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. CloakBrowser leads on adoption by 157% (31,578 vs 12,273 stars). CloakBrowser is written in Python under MIT; crawlab is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause. CloakBrowser has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, crawlab 15%. CloakBrowser 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| CloakBrowser | crawlab | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 12K |
| License | MIT | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-02-10 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.6K | ⑂ 1.9K |
| 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 crawlab if
- You want the crawlab feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and crawlab 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 crawlab
Crawlab is a BSD 3 Clause licensed, Go based distributed web crawler admin platform that manages spiders regardless of the language or framework they are written in, built for teams that run many crawlers and need one place to schedule, monitor, and inspect them.
read the full crawlab overview →
More in Data & Analytics
Related comparisons
More Data Extraction & Web Scraping projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Data Extraction & Web Scraping field.
Frequently asked questions
Is CloakBrowser or crawlab more popular?
CloakBrowser has 31,578 GitHub stars and crawlab has 12,273. CloakBrowser has the larger community by that measure.
Are CloakBrowser and crawlab free?
Both are open source. CloakBrowser is licensed under MIT and crawlab under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between CloakBrowser and crawlab?
CloakBrowser is written in Python and crawlab 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 crawlab?
Choose CloakBrowser if you want the larger community (31,578 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose crawlab if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.