head to head · open source
colly vs node-crawler
colly has 25,520 GitHub stars, 1,862 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. node-crawler has 6,792 stars, 864 forks, 29 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. colly leads on adoption by 276% (25,520 vs 6,792 stars). colly is written in Go under Apache-2.0; node-crawler is written in TypeScript under MIT. colly has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, node-crawler 13%. 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 | node-crawler | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 6.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-06-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 864 |
| 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 node-crawler if
- You want the node-crawler feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and node-crawler fits your workflow better
About colly
Colly is an open source scraping and crawling framework written in Go, distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. It lives in the Go ecosystem and is consumed as a library rather than a standalone application: the README describes it as providing a clean interface for writing any kind of crawler, scraper, or spider, and the project's own topics list it as a crawler, crawling framework, scraper, scraping tool, and spider. The repository has been public for roughly nine years, carries 25,516 stars and 1,862 forks, and its most recent push was on 2 September 2026. Documentation and examples are hosted at go colly.org…
read the full colly overview →
About node-crawler
node crawler is a web crawler and spider library for Node.js that pairs a request queue with a server side DOM. It lives in the Node.js ecosystem and is published to npm under the package name crawler . The project is written in TypeScript and released under the MIT license, with 6,792 stars, 864 forks, and 29 open issues at the time of writing. The repository has been in development for 16 years and was last pushed on 18 June 2026. Version 2 is described as the advanced and TypeScript version of the original node crawler, and the topic list — cheerio, crawler, extract data, javascript, jquery, nodejs, spider — r…
read the full node-crawler overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is colly or node-crawler more popular?
colly has 25,520 GitHub stars and node-crawler has 6,792. colly has the larger community by that measure.
Are colly and node-crawler free?
Both are open source. colly is licensed under Apache-2.0 and node-crawler under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between colly and node-crawler?
colly is written in Go and node-crawler in TypeScript. 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 node-crawler?
Choose colly if you want the larger community (25,520 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose node-crawler if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.