head to head · open source
crawlee vs browserless
crawlee has 26,335 GitHub stars, 1,746 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. browserless has 1,845 stars, 93 forks, 6 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 1,327% (26,335 vs 1,845 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; browserless is written in JavaScript under MIT. crawlee has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, browserless 5%. crawlee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 5 topic tags (automation, headless, javascript, nodejs), 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| crawlee | browserless | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 1.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 93 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick crawlee if
- You weight community size — 26K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick browserless if
- You want the browserless feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and browserless fits your workflow better
About crawlee
A web scraping and browser automation library Crawlee covers your crawling and scraping end to end and helps you build reliable scrapers. Fast. Your crawlers will appear human like and fly under the radar of modern bot protections even with the default configuration. Crawlee gives you the tools to crawl the web for links, scrape data, and store it to disk or cloud while staying configurable to suit your project's needs. Crawlee is available as the crawlee NPM package. 👉 View full documentation, guides and examples on the Crawlee project website 👈 Do you prefer 🐍 Python instead of JavaScript? 👉 Checkout…
read the full crawlee overview →
About browserless
The headless Chrome/Chromium driver on top of Puppeteer. Highlights Installation Usage The cloud API solution CLI Initializing a browser .constructor(options) .createContext(options) .browser() .respawn() .close() Built in .html(url, options) .text(url, options) .pdf(url, options) .screenshot(url, options) .destroyContext(options) .getDevice(options) .evaluate(fn, gotoOpts) .goto(page, options) .context() [.withPage(fn, \[options\])]( withpagefn options) [.page(\[name\])]( pagename) Extended ai function lighthouse screencast Packages FAQ License Highlights Compatible with Puppeteer API (text, screenshot, html…
read the full browserless overview →
More in Data & Analytics
Related comparisons
More Data Extraction & Web Scraping projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Data Extraction & Web Scraping field.
Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or browserless more popular?
crawlee has 26,335 GitHub stars and browserless has 1,845. crawlee has the larger community by that measure.
Are crawlee and browserless free?
Both are open source. crawlee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and browserless under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between crawlee and browserless?
crawlee is written in TypeScript and browserless in JavaScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, crawlee or browserless?
Choose crawlee if you want the larger community (26,335 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose browserless if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.