head to head · open source
colly vs trafilatura
colly has 25,572 GitHub stars, 1,859 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 18 days ago. trafilatura has 7,061 stars, 488 forks, 60 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. colly leads on adoption by 262% (25,572 vs 7,061 stars). colly is written in Go under Apache-2.0; trafilatura is written in Python under Apache-2.0. colly has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, trafilatura 7%. trafilatura was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (crawler), 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 | trafilatura | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 7.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-10-16 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 488 |
| 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 trafilatura if
- You want the trafilatura feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and trafilatura 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 trafilatura
Trafilatura: Discover Web Content, Extract Text and Metadata Introduction Trafilatura is a comprehensive Python package and command line tool designed to gather text from the Web and turn raw HTML into structured, meaningful data . It includes all necessary discovery and text processing components to perform web crawling, downloads, scraping, and extraction of main texts, metadata and comments. It aims at staying handy and modular : no database is required, the output can be converted to commonly used formats. Going from raw HTML to essential parts, it focuses on the actual content , avoids noise caused by…
read the full trafilatura overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is colly or trafilatura more popular?
colly has 25,572 GitHub stars and trafilatura has 7,061. colly has the larger community by that measure.
Are colly and trafilatura free?
Both are open source. colly is licensed under Apache-2.0 and trafilatura under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between colly and trafilatura?
colly is written in Go and trafilatura 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 trafilatura?
Choose colly if you want the larger community (25,572 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose trafilatura if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.