head to head · open source
CloakBrowser vs ruia
CloakBrowser has 31,712 GitHub stars, 2,639 forks, 235 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. ruia has 1,737 stars, 185 forks, 9 open issues and last shipped 10 days ago. CloakBrowser leads on adoption by 1,726% (31,712 vs 1,737 stars). CloakBrowser is written in Python under MIT; ruia is written in Python under Apache-2.0. CloakBrowser has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, ruia 11%. 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 | ruia | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 1.7K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-24 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.6K | ⑂ 185 |
| 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 ruia if
- You want the ruia 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 ruia 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 ruia
Ruia is an asynchronous web scraping micro framework for Python 3.6 and above, built on asyncio and aiohttp , and intended for Python developers who want to declare what a crawler should collect and let the framework handle concurrent requests.
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 ruia more popular?
CloakBrowser has 31,712 GitHub stars and ruia has 1,737. CloakBrowser has the larger community by that measure.
Are CloakBrowser and ruia free?
Both are open source. CloakBrowser is licensed under MIT and ruia under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between CloakBrowser and ruia?
CloakBrowser is written in Python and ruia 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 ruia?
Choose CloakBrowser if you want the larger community (31,712 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose ruia if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.