head to head · open source
colly vs katana
colly has 25,572 GitHub stars, 1,859 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 18 days ago. katana has 17,786 stars, 1,213 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped yesterday. colly leads on adoption by 44% (25,572 vs 17,786 stars). colly is written in Go under Apache-2.0; katana is written in Go under MIT. colly has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, katana 7%. katana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (crawler), 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 | katana | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 18K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-16 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| 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 katana if
- You want the katana feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and katana 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 katana
A next generation crawling and spidering framework Features • Installation • Usage • Scope • Config • Filters • Join Discord Features Fast And fully configurable web crawling Standard and Headless mode JavaScript parsing / crawling Customizable automatic form filling Scope control Preconfigured field / Regex Knowledge base ML page type / form classification (auto downloaded model) Customizable output Preconfigured fields INPUT STDIN , URL and LIST OUTPUT STDOUT , FILE and JSON Installation katana requires Go 1.26+ to install successfully. If you encounter any installation issues, we recommend trying with the…
read the full katana overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is colly or katana more popular?
colly has 25,572 GitHub stars and katana has 17,786. colly has the larger community by that measure.
Are colly and katana free?
Both are open source. colly is licensed under Apache-2.0 and katana under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between colly and katana?
colly is written in Go and katana 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 katana?
Choose colly if you want the larger community (25,572 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose katana if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.