head to head · open source
CloakBrowser vs gain
CloakBrowser has 31,578 GitHub stars, 2,615 forks, 227 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. gain has 2,019 stars, 204 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. CloakBrowser leads on adoption by 1,464% (31,578 vs 2,019 stars). CloakBrowser is written in Python under MIT; gain is written in Python under MIT. CloakBrowser has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, gain 10%. 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 | gain | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 2.0K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-08-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.6K | ⑂ 204 |
| 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 gain if
- You want the gain feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and gain 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 gain
gain is an MIT licensed, asyncio based web crawling framework for Python that lets developers declare items and parsers while the framework handles concurrency, retries, and persistence on their behalf.
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Frequently asked questions
Is CloakBrowser or gain more popular?
CloakBrowser has 31,578 GitHub stars and gain has 2,019. CloakBrowser has the larger community by that measure.
Are CloakBrowser and gain free?
Both are open source. CloakBrowser is licensed under MIT and gain under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between CloakBrowser and gain?
CloakBrowser is written in Python and gain 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 gain?
Choose CloakBrowser if you want the larger community (31,578 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose gain if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.