head to head · open source
colly vs x-crawl
colly has 25,527 GitHub stars, 1,862 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. x-crawl has 1,883 stars, 116 forks, 16 open issues and last shipped yesterday. colly leads on adoption by 1,256% (25,527 vs 1,883 stars). colly is written in Go under Apache-2.0; x-crawl is written in TypeScript under MIT. colly has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, x-crawl 6%. x-crawl was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (crawler, spider), 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 | x-crawl | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 1.9K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 116 |
| 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 x-crawl if
- You want the x-crawl feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and x-crawl 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 x-crawl
x crawl is a flexible, MIT licensed Node.js and TypeScript crawler library that pairs a conventional scraping API with optional AI assistance through Ollama and OpenAI, built for developers who need to pull data from dynamic pages, static pages, interface responses, and files under one consistent interface.
read the full x-crawl overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is colly or x-crawl more popular?
colly has 25,527 GitHub stars and x-crawl has 1,883. colly has the larger community by that measure.
Are colly and x-crawl free?
Both are open source. colly is licensed under Apache-2.0 and x-crawl under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between colly and x-crawl?
colly is written in Go and x-crawl in TypeScript. 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 x-crawl?
Choose colly if you want the larger community (25,527 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose x-crawl if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.