head to head · open source
crawlee vs invisible_playwright
crawlee has 25,841 GitHub stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. invisible_playwright has 2,839 stars, 284 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped today. crawlee leads on adoption by 810% (25,841 vs 2,839 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; invisible_playwright is written in Python under MIT. crawlee has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, invisible_playwright 10%. invisible_playwright 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 | invisible_playwright | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 2.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 284 |
| 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
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 invisible_playwright
invisible playwright is a free, MIT licensed Python package that makes Playwright's headless Firefox present as a real browser and behave like a real user, built for developers whose scrapers must clear bot detection such as reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha and Cloudflare Turnstile.
read the full invisible_playwright overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or invisible_playwright more popular?
crawlee has 25,841 GitHub stars and invisible_playwright has 2,839. 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 (25,841 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.