head to head · open source
colly vs crawlab
colly has 25,527 GitHub stars, 1,862 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. crawlab has 12,273 stars, 1,889 forks, 166 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. colly leads on adoption by 108% (25,527 vs 12,273 stars). colly is written in Go under Apache-2.0; crawlab is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause. colly has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, crawlab 15%. colly was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (crawler, go, spider), 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| colly | crawlab | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 12K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-02-10 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 1.9K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick colly if
- You weight community size — 26K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- 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 colly
Colly is an open source scraping and crawling framework written in Go, distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. It lives in the Go ecosystem and is consumed as a library rather than a standalone application: the README describes it as providing a clean interface for writing any kind of crawler, scraper, or spider, and the project's own topics list it as a crawler, crawling framework, scraper, scraping tool, and spider. The repository has been public for roughly nine years, carries 25,516 stars and 1,862 forks, and its most recent push was on 2 September 2026. Documentation and examples are hosted at go colly.org…
read the full colly overview →
About crawlab
Crawlab is a BSD 3 Clause licensed, Go based distributed web crawler admin platform that manages spiders regardless of the language or framework they are written in, built for teams that run many crawlers and need one place to schedule, monitor, and inspect them.
read the full crawlab overview →
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 colly or crawlab more popular?
colly has 25,527 GitHub stars and crawlab has 12,273. colly has the larger community by that measure.
Are colly and crawlab free?
Both are open source. colly is licensed under Apache-2.0 and crawlab under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between colly and crawlab?
colly is written in Go 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, colly or crawlab?
Choose colly if you want the larger community (25,527 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose crawlab if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.