head to head · open source
colly vs crawly
colly has 25,589 GitHub stars, 1,855 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 26 days ago. crawly has 1,129 stars, 125 forks, 8 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. colly leads on adoption by 2,167% (25,589 vs 1,129 stars). colly is written in Go under Apache-2.0; crawly is written in Elixir under Apache-2.0. colly has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, crawly 11%. crawly was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 5 topic tags (crawler, crawling, scraper, scraping), 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 | crawly | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 1.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Elixir |
| Last push | 2026-10-16 | 2026-11-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 125 |
| 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 crawly if
- You want the crawly feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Elixir
- You evaluated both and crawly 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 crawly
Crawly Overview Crawly is an application framework for crawling web sites and extracting structured data which can be used for a wide range of useful applications, like data mining, information processing or historical archival. Requirements 1. Elixir 1.14 2. Works on GNU/Linux, Windows, macOS X, and BSD. Quickstart 0. Create a new project: mix new quickstart sup 1. Add Crawly as a dependencies: 2. Fetch dependencies: $ mix deps.get 3. Create a spider New in 0.15.0 : It's possible to use the command to speed up the spider creation, so you will have a generated file with all needed callbacks: mix…
read the full crawly overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is colly or crawly more popular?
colly has 25,589 GitHub stars and crawly has 1,129. colly has the larger community by that measure.
Are colly and crawly free?
Both are open source. colly is licensed under Apache-2.0 and crawly under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between colly and crawly?
colly is written in Go and crawly in Elixir. 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 crawly?
Choose colly if you want the larger community (25,589 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose crawly if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.