head to head · open source
colly vs icrawler
colly has 25,575 GitHub stars, 1,860 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 20 days ago. icrawler has 935 stars, 181 forks, 31 open issues and last shipped 11 months ago. colly leads on adoption by 2,635% (25,575 vs 935 stars). colly is written in Go under Apache-2.0; icrawler is written in Python under MIT. colly has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, icrawler 19%. colly was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (crawler, spider), 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 | icrawler | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 935 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-10-16 | 2025-12-10 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 181 |
| 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 icrawler if
- You want the icrawler feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and icrawler 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 icrawler
icrawler ======== .. image:: :target: :alt: PyPI Version .. image:: :target: :alt: Anaconda Version .. image:: :alt: Python Version .. image:: :alt: License Introduction Documentation: Try it with pip install icrawler or conda install c hellock icrawler . This package is a mini framework of web crawlers. With modularization design, it is easy to use and extend. It supports media data like images and videos very well, and can also be applied to texts and other type of files. Scrapy is heavy and powerful, while icrawler is tiny and flexible. With this package, you can write a multiple thread crawler easily by…
read the full icrawler overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is colly or icrawler more popular?
colly has 25,575 GitHub stars and icrawler has 935. colly has the larger community by that measure.
Are colly and icrawler free?
Both are open source. colly is licensed under Apache-2.0 and icrawler under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between colly and icrawler?
colly is written in Go and icrawler 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 icrawler?
Choose colly if you want the larger community (25,575 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose icrawler if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.