head to head · open source
crawlee vs katana
crawlee has 26,317 GitHub stars, 1,740 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. katana has 17,786 stars, 1,213 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped yesterday. crawlee leads on adoption by 48% (26,317 vs 17,786 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; katana is written in Go under MIT. crawlee has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, katana 7%. crawlee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (crawler, headless), 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 | katana | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 18K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| 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 katana if
- You want the katana feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and katana 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 katana
A next generation crawling and spidering framework Features • Installation • Usage • Scope • Config • Filters • Join Discord Features Fast And fully configurable web crawling Standard and Headless mode JavaScript parsing / crawling Customizable automatic form filling Scope control Preconfigured field / Regex Knowledge base ML page type / form classification (auto downloaded model) Customizable output Preconfigured fields INPUT STDIN , URL and LIST OUTPUT STDOUT , FILE and JSON Installation katana requires Go 1.26+ to install successfully. If you encounter any installation issues, we recommend trying with the…
read the full katana overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or katana more popular?
crawlee has 26,317 GitHub stars and katana has 17,786. crawlee has the larger community by that measure.
Are crawlee and katana free?
Both are open source. crawlee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and katana under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between crawlee and katana?
crawlee is written in TypeScript and katana 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 katana?
Choose crawlee if you want the larger community (26,317 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose katana if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.