head to head · open source
colly vs node-crawler
colly has 25,572 GitHub stars, 1,859 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 18 days ago. node-crawler has 6,796 stars, 862 forks, 29 open issues and last shipped 5 months ago. colly leads on adoption by 276% (25,572 vs 6,796 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 | 2026-10-16 | 2026-06-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 862 |
| 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 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 node-crawler
[![NPM download][download image]][download url] [![Package Quality][quality image]][quality url] [quality image]: [quality url]: [download image]: [download url]: Crawler v2 : Advanced and Typescript version of node crawler Features: Server side DOM & automatic jQuery insertion with Cheerio (default), Configurable pool size and retries, Control rate limit, Priority queue of requests, let crawler deal for you with charset detection and conversion, If you have prior experience with Crawler v1, for fast migration, please proceed to the section Differences and Breaking Changes. Use with AI agents This package ships…
read the full node-crawler overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is colly or node-crawler more popular?
colly has 25,572 GitHub stars and node-crawler has 6,796. 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 (25,572 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.