head to head · open source
colly vs rod
colly has 25,572 GitHub stars, 1,859 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 18 days ago. rod has 7,143 stars, 489 forks, 212 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. colly leads on adoption by 258% (25,572 vs 7,143 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 | 2026-10-16 | 2026-08-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 489 |
| 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 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…
read the full colly overview →
About rod
Overview [ ][discord room] Documentation API reference FAQ Rod is a high level driver directly based on DevTools Protocol. It's designed for web automation and scraping for both high level and low level use, senior developers can use the low level packages and functions to easily customize or build up their own version of Rod, the high level functions are just examples to build a default version of Rod. 中文 API 文档 Features Chained context design, intuitive to timeout or cancel the long running task Auto wait elements to be ready Debugging friendly, auto input tracing, remote monitoring headless browser Thread…
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Frequently asked questions
Is colly or rod more popular?
colly has 25,572 GitHub stars and rod has 7,143. 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 (25,572 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose rod if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.