head to head · open source
crawlee vs camofox-browser
crawlee has 25,841 GitHub stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. camofox-browser has 11,105 stars, 1,098 forks, 66 open issues and last shipped yesterday. crawlee leads on adoption by 133% (25,841 vs 11,105 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; camofox-browser is written in JavaScript under MIT. crawlee has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, camofox-browser 10%. camofox-browser was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 5 topic tags (automation, javascript, nodejs, playwright), 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 | camofox-browser | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 11K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| 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 camofox-browser if
- You want the camofox-browser feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and camofox-browser 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 camofox-browser
camofox browser is an anti detection browser server for AI agents, built in JavaScript and distributed under the MIT license. It wraps Camoufox, a Firefox fork that performs fingerprint spoofing at the C++ implementation level, and exposes that engine through a REST API designed for programmatic agents rather than human users. The project lives in the Node.js ecosystem and is published by the team behind jo, a personal AI agent. It is positioned as a drop in replacement for Puppeteer and Playwright when those tools are blocked.
read the full camofox-browser overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or camofox-browser more popular?
crawlee has 25,841 GitHub stars and camofox-browser has 11,105. crawlee has the larger community by that measure.
Are crawlee and camofox-browser free?
Both are open source. crawlee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and camofox-browser under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between crawlee and camofox-browser?
crawlee is written in TypeScript and camofox-browser 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 camofox-browser?
Choose crawlee if you want the larger community (25,841 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose camofox-browser if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.