head to head · open source
CloakBrowser vs crawlee
CloakBrowser has 31,528 GitHub stars, 2,612 forks, 224 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. crawlee has 25,823 stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. CloakBrowser leads on adoption by 22% (31,528 vs 25,823 stars). CloakBrowser is written in Python under MIT; crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. CloakBrowser has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, crawlee 6%. crawlee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (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
| CloakBrowser | crawlee | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 26K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-13 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.6K | ⑂ 1.7K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick CloakBrowser if
- You weight community size — 32K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick crawlee if
- You want the crawlee feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and crawlee fits your workflow better
About CloakBrowser
CloakBrowser is a stealth Chromium build for Python and JavaScript teams that need browser automation to survive bot detection systems, aimed at scraping and AI agent engineers who want to replace Playwright or Puppeteer without rewriting their code.
read the full CloakBrowser overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is CloakBrowser or crawlee more popular?
CloakBrowser has 31,528 GitHub stars and crawlee has 25,823. CloakBrowser has the larger community by that measure.
Are CloakBrowser and crawlee free?
Both are open source. CloakBrowser is licensed under MIT and crawlee under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between CloakBrowser and crawlee?
CloakBrowser is written in Python and crawlee in TypeScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, CloakBrowser or crawlee?
Choose CloakBrowser if you want the larger community (31,528 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose crawlee if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.