head to head · open source
colly vs ferret
colly has 25,572 GitHub stars, 1,859 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 18 days ago. ferret has 6,020 stars, 325 forks, 12 open issues and last shipped yesterday. colly leads on adoption by 325% (25,572 vs 6,020 stars). colly is written in Go under Apache-2.0; ferret is written in Go under Apache-2.0. colly has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, ferret 5%. ferret was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (go, golang), 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 | ferret | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 6.0K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-16 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 325 |
| 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 ferret if
- You want the ferret 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 ferret 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…
read the full colly overview →
About ferret
Ferret Try it! Docs CLI Test runner Web worker Explore Ferret v2 Ferret v2 is currently in alpha. You can try the new syntax in the playground and read more about the design behind the new runtime and language capabilities: Try Ferret v2 in the Playground On the Road to Ferret v2 Inside Ferret v2: The New Execution Model Inside Ferret v2: New Language Capabilities Notice: This branch contains the upcoming Ferret v2 . For the stable v1 release, please visit Ferret v1. What is it? Ferret is a declarative first, expression oriented embedded language and runtime for data automation. FQL combines querying…
read the full ferret overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is colly or ferret more popular?
colly has 25,572 GitHub stars and ferret has 6,020. colly has the larger community by that measure.
Are colly and ferret free?
Both are open source. colly is licensed under Apache-2.0 and ferret under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between colly and ferret?
colly is written in Go and ferret 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 ferret?
Choose colly if you want the larger community (25,572 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose ferret if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.