head to head · open source
colly vs skills
colly has 25,520 GitHub stars, 1,862 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. skills has 5,946 stars, 295 forks, 7 open issues and last shipped 25 days ago. colly leads on adoption by 329% (25,520 vs 5,946 stars). colly is written in Go under Apache-2.0; skills is written in Python under MIT. colly has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, skills 5%. colly was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | skills | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 5.9K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-08-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 295 |
| 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 skills if
- You want the skills feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and skills 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 skills
BrowserAct Skills is a browser automation CLI built for AI agents, distributed as an open source Python project under the MIT license. It lives in the agent infrastructure ecosystem, alongside tooling for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and other agent clients, and it is catalogued here under Data Extraction and Web Scraping. The project has gathered roughly 5,900 stars and 293 forks since it was published about a year ago, with a small open issue count and an active last push.
read the full skills overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is colly or skills more popular?
colly has 25,520 GitHub stars and skills has 5,946. colly has the larger community by that measure.
Are colly and skills free?
Both are open source. colly is licensed under Apache-2.0 and skills under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between colly and skills?
colly is written in Go and skills in Python. 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 skills?
Choose colly if you want the larger community (25,520 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose skills if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.