head to head · open source
colly vs crawlab
colly has 25,575 GitHub stars, 1,860 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 20 days ago. crawlab has 12,290 stars, 1,884 forks, 166 open issues and last shipped 9 months ago. colly leads on adoption by 108% (25,575 vs 12,290 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.
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Side by side
| colly | crawlab | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 12K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-16 | 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 Lightning Fast and Elegant Scraping Framework for Gophers Colly provides a clean interface to write any kind of crawler/scraper/spider. With Colly you can easily extract structured data from websites, which can be used for a wide range of applications, like data mining, data processing or archiving. Sponsors NodeMaven: The most efficient proxy provider for Web Scrapping and Automation with the Highest Quality IP on the market. Why NodeMaven? 99.9% uptime ZIP Targeting IP filtering: all proxies have fraud score 1k request/sec on a single core) Manages request delays and maximum concurrency per domain…
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About crawlab
Crawlab 中文 English Installation Run Screenshot Architecture Integration Compare Community & Sponsorship CHANGELOG Disclaimer Golang based distributed web crawler management platform, supporting various languages including Python, NodeJS, Go, Java, PHP and various web crawler frameworks including Scrapy, Puppeteer, Selenium. Demo Documentation Installation You can follow the installation guide. Quick Start Please open the command line prompt and execute the command below. Make sure you have installed docker compose in advance. Next, you can look into the docker compose.yml (with detailed config params) and the…
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Frequently asked questions
Is colly or crawlab more popular?
colly has 25,575 GitHub stars and crawlab has 12,290. 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 (25,575 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.