head to head · open source
CloakBrowser vs crawlee-python
CloakBrowser has 31,578 GitHub stars, 2,615 forks, 227 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. crawlee-python has 9,540 stars, 808 forks, 100 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. CloakBrowser leads on adoption by 231% (31,578 vs 9,540 stars). CloakBrowser is written in Python under MIT; crawlee-python is written in Python under Apache-2.0. CloakBrowser has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, crawlee-python 8%. CloakBrowser was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (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 | crawlee-python | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 9.5K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.6K | ⑂ 808 |
| 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 crawlee-python if
- You want the crawlee-python feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and crawlee-python 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 crawlee-python
Crawlee for Python is an open source, Apache 2.0 licensed web scraping and browser automation library that lets Python developers build reliable crawlers for extracting data for AI, LLM, RAG, and GPT pipelines, and it is aimed at anyone who needs to crawl sites at scale without hand writing the surrounding infrastructure.
read the full crawlee-python overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is CloakBrowser or crawlee-python more popular?
CloakBrowser has 31,578 GitHub stars and crawlee-python has 9,540. CloakBrowser has the larger community by that measure.
Are CloakBrowser and crawlee-python free?
Both are open source. CloakBrowser is licensed under MIT and crawlee-python under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between CloakBrowser and crawlee-python?
CloakBrowser is written in Python and crawlee-python in Python. 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 crawlee-python?
Choose CloakBrowser if you want the larger community (31,578 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose crawlee-python if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.