head to head · open source
crawlee vs curl_cffi
crawlee has 26,317 GitHub stars, 1,740 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. curl_cffi has 6,812 stars, 571 forks, 72 open issues and last shipped 7 days ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 286% (26,317 vs 6,812 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; curl_cffi is written in Python under MIT. crawlee has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, curl_cffi 8%. crawlee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | curl_cffi | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 6.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 571 |
| 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 curl_cffi if
- You want the curl_cffi feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and curl_cffi 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 curl_cffi
curl cffi Documentation Python binding for curl impersonate fork via cffi. For commercial support, visit impersonate.pro. curl cffi is the most popular Python binding for curl . Unlike other pure python http clients like httpx or requests , curl cffi can impersonate browsers' TLS/JA3 and HTTP/2 fingerprints. If you are blocked by some website for no obvious reason, you can give curl cffi a try. For JavaScript bindings, see impers, for solving JavaScript challenges, see brimp. Python 3.10 is the minimum supported version since v0.14. Recent highlights 🧭 Our new toy, brimp, a lightweight browser, works like curl…
read the full curl_cffi overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or curl_cffi more popular?
crawlee has 26,317 GitHub stars and curl_cffi has 6,812. crawlee has the larger community by that measure.
Are crawlee and curl_cffi free?
Both are open source. crawlee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and curl_cffi under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between crawlee and curl_cffi?
crawlee is written in TypeScript and curl_cffi 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 curl_cffi?
Choose crawlee if you want the larger community (26,317 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose curl_cffi if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.