head to head · open source
colly vs xxl-crawler
colly has 25,575 GitHub stars, 1,860 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 20 days ago. xxl-crawler has 757 stars, 316 forks, 7 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. colly leads on adoption by 3,278% (25,575 vs 757 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 | ★ 757 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-10-16 | 2026-08-08 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 316 |
| 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 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 xxl-crawler
XXL CRAWLER XXL CRAWLER, a lightweight web crawler framework. Home Page Introduction XXL CRAWLER is a lightweight web crawler framework. A line of code to develop a multi threaded crawler, fully annotated way to collect page data to Java objects, with "multi threaded, fully annotated, JS rendering, proxy, distributed extension" and other features; XXL CRAWLER 是一个轻量级Java爬虫框架。一行代码开发一个多线程爬虫，全注解方式采集页面数据至Java对象，拥有"多线程、全注解、JS渲染、代理、分布式扩展"等特性； Documentation 中文文档 Features 1、简洁：API直观简洁，可快速上手； 2、轻量级：底层实现仅强依赖jsoup，简洁高效； 3、模块化：模块化的结构设计，可轻松扩展； 4、全注解：支持通过注解提取页面数据，高效映射页面数据到PageVO对象，底层自动完成PageVO对象的数据抽取和封装返回；单个页面支持抽取一个或多个PageVO；…
read the full xxl-crawler overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is colly or xxl-crawler more popular?
colly has 25,575 GitHub stars and xxl-crawler has 757. 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 (25,575 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.