head to head · open source
crawlee vs katana
crawlee has 25,823 GitHub stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. katana has 17,518 stars, 1,183 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 47% (25,823 vs 17,518 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; katana is written in Go under MIT. crawlee has attracted 6% 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 | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-14 |
| 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
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 katana
Katana is an open source, MIT licensed crawling and spidering framework written in Go, built for security engineers and automation pipelines that need to map web applications at scale rather than explore them by hand.
read the full katana overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or katana more popular?
crawlee has 25,823 GitHub stars and katana has 17,518. 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 (25,823 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose katana if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.