head to head · open source
crawlee vs ferret
crawlee has 25,823 GitHub stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. ferret has 6,011 stars, 324 forks, 12 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 330% (25,823 vs 6,011 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; ferret is written in Go under Apache-2.0. crawlee has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, ferret 5%. 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 | ferret | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 6.0K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 324 |
| 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 ferret if
- You want the ferret feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and ferret 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 ferret
Ferret is a declarative data automation language and embeddable Go runtime for structured extraction workflows, built for Go developers who need to query, transform, and synchronize structured data across browsers, APIs, databases, and documents from inside their own applications.
read the full ferret overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or ferret more popular?
crawlee has 25,823 GitHub stars and ferret has 6,011. crawlee has the larger community by that measure.
Are crawlee and ferret free?
Both are open source. crawlee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and ferret under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between crawlee and ferret?
crawlee is written in TypeScript and ferret in Go. 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 ferret?
Choose crawlee if you want the larger community (25,823 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose ferret if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.