head to head · open source
crawlee vs invisible_playwright
crawlee has 26,327 GitHub stars, 1,742 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. invisible_playwright has 2,554 stars, 276 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped yesterday. crawlee leads on adoption by 931% (26,327 vs 2,554 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; invisible_playwright is written in Python under MIT. crawlee has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, invisible_playwright 11%. invisible_playwright 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
| crawlee | invisible_playwright | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 2.6K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 276 |
| 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 invisible_playwright if
- You want the invisible_playwright feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and invisible_playwright 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 invisible_playwright
Free antidetect browser stealth for Playwright: undetected Firefox fingerprint, headless or headed. Python web scraping and captcha bypass. Open source, and it passes every bot detection test. How it works Anti bots ask two questions, and reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha and Cloudflare Turnstile score the answers. invisible playwright answers yes to both. 1. Is this a real browser? Yes. It is Firefox, patched at the C++ source level. The browser fingerprint is set inside the engine, not injected into the page: navigator, screen, GPU/WebGL, canvas, fonts, audio, WebRTC, timezone, network. Headless or headed, the same values…
read the full invisible_playwright overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or invisible_playwright more popular?
crawlee has 26,327 GitHub stars and invisible_playwright has 2,554. crawlee has the larger community by that measure.
Are crawlee and invisible_playwright free?
Both are open source. crawlee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and invisible_playwright under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between crawlee and invisible_playwright?
crawlee is written in TypeScript and invisible_playwright 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 invisible_playwright?
Choose crawlee if you want the larger community (26,327 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose invisible_playwright if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.