head to head · open source
colly vs rod
colly has 25,520 GitHub stars, 1,862 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. rod has 7,104 stars, 485 forks, 212 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. colly leads on adoption by 259% (25,520 vs 7,104 stars). colly is written in Go under Apache-2.0; rod is written in Go under MIT. colly has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, rod 7%. colly was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (crawling, go, golang), 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 | rod | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 7.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-08-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 485 |
| 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 rod if
- You want the rod feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and rod 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 rod
Rod is a high level driver for the Chrome DevTools Protocol, written in Go and released under the MIT license. It lives in the Go ecosystem and is published as the module github.com/go rod/rod , with documentation hosted at go rod.github.io and an API reference on pkg.go.dev. The project is designed for web automation and scraping, and it deliberately spans two levels of use: senior developers can work with the low level packages and functions to customize the driver or build their own version of it, while the high level functions serve as examples that produce a default, ready to use build.
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Frequently asked questions
Is colly or rod more popular?
colly has 25,520 GitHub stars and rod has 7,104. colly has the larger community by that measure.
Are colly and rod free?
Both are open source. colly is licensed under Apache-2.0 and rod under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between colly and rod?
colly is written in Go and rod 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 rod?
Choose colly if you want the larger community (25,520 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose rod if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.