head to head · open source
colly vs curl_cffi
colly has 25,572 GitHub stars, 1,859 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 18 days ago. curl_cffi has 6,812 stars, 571 forks, 72 open issues and last shipped 7 days ago. colly leads on adoption by 275% (25,572 vs 6,812 stars). colly is written in Go under Apache-2.0; curl_cffi is written in Python under MIT. colly has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, curl_cffi 8%. curl_cffi 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.
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Side by side
| colly | curl_cffi | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 6.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-10-16 | 2026-10-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 571 |
| 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 curl_cffi if
- You want the curl_cffi feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and curl_cffi 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 curl_cffi
curl cffi Documentation Python binding for curl impersonate fork via cffi. For commercial support, visit impersonate.pro. curl cffi is the most popular Python binding for curl . Unlike other pure python http clients like httpx or requests , curl cffi can impersonate browsers' TLS/JA3 and HTTP/2 fingerprints. If you are blocked by some website for no obvious reason, you can give curl cffi a try. For JavaScript bindings, see impers, for solving JavaScript challenges, see brimp. Python 3.10 is the minimum supported version since v0.14. Recent highlights 🧭 Our new toy, brimp, a lightweight browser, works like curl…
read the full curl_cffi overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is colly or curl_cffi more popular?
colly has 25,572 GitHub stars and curl_cffi has 6,812. colly has the larger community by that measure.
Are colly and curl_cffi free?
Both are open source. colly is licensed under Apache-2.0 and curl_cffi under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between colly and curl_cffi?
colly is written in Go and curl_cffi 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, colly or curl_cffi?
Choose colly if you want the larger community (25,572 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose curl_cffi if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.