head to head · open source
colly vs pydoll
colly has 25,572 GitHub stars, 1,859 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 18 days ago. pydoll has 7,132 stars, 413 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped 25 days ago. colly leads on adoption by 259% (25,572 vs 7,132 stars). colly is written in Go under Apache-2.0; pydoll is written in HTML under MIT. colly has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, pydoll 6%. colly was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (scraping), 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 | pydoll | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 7.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | HTML |
| Last push | 2026-10-16 | 2026-10-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 413 |
| 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 pydoll if
- You want the pydoll feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches HTML
- You evaluated both and pydoll 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 pydoll
The stealth first browser automation library for Python. No WebDriver, no navigator.webdriver flag, humanized clicks and typing. = 3.10" Documentation · Getting Started · Features · Support You have probably watched a scraper work on your machine, then hit a wall of captchas and Cloudflare challenges the moment it ran for real. That wall is what Pydoll is built around. It drives Chrome directly over the DevTools Protocol, so there is no WebDriver binary and no navigator.webdriver flag to give you away, and it clicks, types, and scrolls like a real person. That is often enough to get past the…
read the full pydoll overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is colly or pydoll more popular?
colly has 25,572 GitHub stars and pydoll has 7,132. colly has the larger community by that measure.
Are colly and pydoll free?
Both are open source. colly is licensed under Apache-2.0 and pydoll under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between colly and pydoll?
colly is written in Go and pydoll in HTML. 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 pydoll?
Choose colly if you want the larger community (25,572 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose pydoll if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.