head to head · open source
crawlee vs colly
crawlee has 25,823 GitHub stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. colly has 25,520 stars, 1,862 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 1% (25,823 vs 25,520 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; colly is written in Go under Apache-2.0. crawlee has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, colly 7%. crawlee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (crawler, crawling, scraper), 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
| crawlee | colly | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 26K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 1.9K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick crawlee if
- You weight community size — 26K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick colly if
- You want the colly feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and colly fits your workflow better
About crawlee
Crawlee is a web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js, written in TypeScript and published on npm as the crawlee package. It lives in the JavaScript and TypeScript ecosystem, and it covers crawling and scraping end to end: fetching pages, following links, extracting data, and storing the results to disk or to the cloud. The project also has a Python counterpart, Crawlee for Python, maintained alongside it by Apify.
read the full crawlee overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or colly more popular?
crawlee has 25,823 GitHub stars and colly has 25,520. crawlee has the larger community by that measure.
Are crawlee and colly free?
Both are open source. crawlee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and colly under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between crawlee and colly?
crawlee is written in TypeScript and colly 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, crawlee or colly?
Choose crawlee if you want the larger community (25,823 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose colly if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.