head to head · open source
CloakBrowser vs crawlab
CloakBrowser has 32,712 GitHub stars, 2,720 forks, 164 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. crawlab has 12,290 stars, 1,884 forks, 166 open issues and last shipped 9 months ago. CloakBrowser leads on adoption by 166% (32,712 vs 12,290 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.
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Side by side
| CloakBrowser | crawlab | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 33K | ★ 12K |
| License | MIT | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-03 | 2026-02-10 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.7K | ⑂ 1.9K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick CloakBrowser if
- You weight community size — 33K 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
Stealth Chromium that passes every bot detection test. Not a patched config. Not a JS injection. A real Chromium binary with fingerprints modified at the C++ source level. Antibot systems score it as a normal browser — because it is a normal browser. Cloudflare Turnstile — 3 live tests passing (headed mode, macOS) Drop in Playwright/Puppeteer replacement for Python and JavaScript. Same API, same code — just swap the import. 3 lines of code, 30 seconds to unblock. 87 source level C++ patches — canvas, WebGL, audio, fonts, GPU, screen, WebRTC, network timing, automation signals, CDP input behavior humanize=True —…
read the full CloakBrowser overview →
About crawlab
Crawlab 中文 English Installation Run Screenshot Architecture Integration Compare Community & Sponsorship CHANGELOG Disclaimer Golang based distributed web crawler management platform, supporting various languages including Python, NodeJS, Go, Java, PHP and various web crawler frameworks including Scrapy, Puppeteer, Selenium. Demo Documentation Installation You can follow the installation guide. Quick Start Please open the command line prompt and execute the command below. Make sure you have installed docker compose in advance. Next, you can look into the docker compose.yml (with detailed config params) and the…
read the full crawlab overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is CloakBrowser or crawlab more popular?
CloakBrowser has 32,712 GitHub stars and crawlab has 12,290. 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 (32,712 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose crawlab if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.