head to head · open source
colly vs firecrawl-mcp-server
colly has 25,572 GitHub stars, 1,859 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 18 days ago. firecrawl-mcp-server has 7,751 stars, 926 forks, 136 open issues and last shipped yesterday. colly leads on adoption by 230% (25,572 vs 7,751 stars). colly is written in Go under Apache-2.0; firecrawl-mcp-server is written in JavaScript under MIT. colly has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, firecrawl-mcp-server 12%. firecrawl-mcp-server 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 | firecrawl-mcp-server | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 7.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-10-16 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 926 |
| 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 firecrawl-mcp-server if
- You want the firecrawl-mcp-server feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and firecrawl-mcp-server 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 firecrawl-mcp-server
Firecrawl MCP Server A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that brings Firecrawl to MCP compatible AI agents — search, scrape, and interact with the live web for clean, agent ready context. Big thanks to @vrknetha, @knacklabs for the initial implementation! Features Search the web and get full page content Search an index built for coding agents: GitHub issues, merged pull requests, READMEs, and docs Scrape any URL into clean, structured data Interact with pages — click, navigate, and operate Deep research with autonomous agent Automatic retries and rate limiting Cloud and self hosted support SSE support Play…
read the full firecrawl-mcp-server overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is colly or firecrawl-mcp-server more popular?
colly has 25,572 GitHub stars and firecrawl-mcp-server has 7,751. colly has the larger community by that measure.
Are colly and firecrawl-mcp-server free?
Both are open source. colly is licensed under Apache-2.0 and firecrawl-mcp-server under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between colly and firecrawl-mcp-server?
colly is written in Go and firecrawl-mcp-server in JavaScript. 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 firecrawl-mcp-server?
Choose colly if you want the larger community (25,572 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose firecrawl-mcp-server if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.