head to head · open source
colly vs xxl-crawler
colly has 25,527 GitHub stars, 1,862 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. xxl-crawler has 758 stars, 318 forks, 7 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. colly leads on adoption by 3,268% (25,527 vs 758 stars). colly is written in Go under Apache-2.0; xxl-crawler is written in Java under Apache-2.0. colly has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, xxl-crawler 42%. colly 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 | xxl-crawler | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 758 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-08-08 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 318 |
| 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 xxl-crawler if
- You want the xxl-crawler feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and xxl-crawler 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 xxl-crawler
XXL CRAWLER is a lightweight, open source Java web crawler framework that lets a developer start a multi threaded crawler with a single line of code and map collected page data into Java objects through annotations, built for Java teams that need to gather web data without adopting a heavyweight scraping platform.
read the full xxl-crawler overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is colly or xxl-crawler more popular?
colly has 25,527 GitHub stars and xxl-crawler has 758. colly has the larger community by that measure.
Are colly and xxl-crawler free?
Both are open source. colly is licensed under Apache-2.0 and xxl-crawler under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between colly and xxl-crawler?
colly is written in Go and xxl-crawler in Java. 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 xxl-crawler?
Choose colly if you want the larger community (25,527 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose xxl-crawler if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.