head to head · open source
colly vs trafilatura
colly has 25,520 GitHub stars, 1,862 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. trafilatura has 6,832 stars, 431 forks, 60 open issues and last shipped 7 days ago. colly leads on adoption by 274% (25,520 vs 6,832 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 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 (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 | ★ 6.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 431 |
| 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 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 trafilatura
Trafilatura is a Python package and command line tool that crawls the web and turns raw HTML into structured text and metadata, built for developers, researchers, and data teams assembling corpora, news feeds, or retrieval augmented generation datasets.
read the full trafilatura overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is colly or trafilatura more popular?
colly has 25,520 GitHub stars and trafilatura has 6,832. 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 (25,520 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.