head to head · open source
crawlee vs browserless
crawlee has 25,841 GitHub stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. browserless has 1,836 stars, 91 forks, 6 open issues and last shipped today. crawlee leads on adoption by 1,307% (25,841 vs 1,836 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; browserless is written in JavaScript under MIT. crawlee has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, browserless 5%. browserless 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.
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Side by side
| crawlee | browserless | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 1.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 91 |
| 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
Crawlee is a web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js, written in TypeScript and published on npm as the crawlee package. It lives in the JavaScript and TypeScript ecosystem, and it covers crawling and scraping end to end: fetching pages, following links, extracting data, and storing the results to disk or to the cloud. The project also has a Python counterpart, Crawlee for Python, maintained alongside it by Apify.
read the full crawlee overview →
About browserless
Browserless is an MIT licensed JavaScript library that drives headless Chrome and Chromium on top of Puppeteer, giving Node.js applications a production ready API for screenshots, PDFs, and extracted text or HTML.
read the full browserless overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or browserless more popular?
crawlee has 25,841 GitHub stars and browserless has 1,836. 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 (25,841 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose browserless if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.