head to head · open source
CloakBrowser vs crw
CloakBrowser has 31,528 GitHub stars, 2,612 forks, 224 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. crw has 1,045 stars, 80 forks, 10 open issues and last shipped yesterday. CloakBrowser leads on adoption by 2,917% (31,528 vs 1,045 stars). CloakBrowser is written in Python under MIT; crw is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0. CloakBrowser has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, crw 8%. crw was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (ai-agents), 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 | crw | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 1.0K |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Python | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-13 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.6K | ⑂ 80 |
| 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 crw if
- You want the crw feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and crw 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 crw
crw (fastCRW) is a Rust based web scraping, crawling, and search engine with an MCP server that turns URLs into clean markdown or structured JSON, aimed at AI agents and the developers who wire them into coding tools.
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Frequently asked questions
Is CloakBrowser or crw more popular?
CloakBrowser has 31,528 GitHub stars and crw has 1,045. CloakBrowser has the larger community by that measure.
Are CloakBrowser and crw free?
Both are open source. CloakBrowser is licensed under MIT and crw under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between CloakBrowser and crw?
CloakBrowser is written in Python and crw in Rust. 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 crw?
Choose CloakBrowser if you want the larger community (31,528 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose crw if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.