head to head · open source
crawlee vs crawlee-python
crawlee has 25,841 GitHub stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. crawlee-python has 9,540 stars, 808 forks, 100 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 171% (25,841 vs 9,540 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; crawlee-python is written in Python under Apache-2.0. crawlee has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, crawlee-python 8%. crawlee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 8 topic tags (apify, automation, crawler, crawling), 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 | crawlee-python | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 9.5K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 808 |
| 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 crawlee-python if
- You want the crawlee-python feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and crawlee-python 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 crawlee-python
Crawlee for Python is an open source, Apache 2.0 licensed web scraping and browser automation library that lets Python developers build reliable crawlers for extracting data for AI, LLM, RAG, and GPT pipelines, and it is aimed at anyone who needs to crawl sites at scale without hand writing the surrounding infrastructure.
read the full crawlee-python overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or crawlee-python more popular?
crawlee has 25,841 GitHub stars and crawlee-python has 9,540. crawlee has the larger community by that measure.
Are crawlee and crawlee-python free?
Both are open source. crawlee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and crawlee-python under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between crawlee and crawlee-python?
crawlee is written in TypeScript and crawlee-python in Python. 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 crawlee-python?
Choose crawlee if you want the larger community (25,841 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose crawlee-python if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.