head to head · open source
crawlee vs moli
crawlee has 26,327 GitHub stars, 1,742 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. moli has 22,489 stars, 622 forks, 126 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 17% (26,327 vs 22,489 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; moli is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. crawlee has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, moli 3%. crawlee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (headless, playwright, puppeteer), 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 | moli | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 22K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 622 |
| 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 moli if
- You want the moli feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and moli 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 moli
Moli English 简体中文 日本語 Deutsch Français Español Moli is a production ready headless browser for AI agents. Its on demand layout and rendering design combines a complete browser runtime with a lightweight resource footprint. Moli helps your AI agent fetch and extract web pages, search the web, and automate browser tasks. Use it through the CLI, CDP, WebDriver Classic, or WebDriver BiDi. Moli supports Linux, macOS, and Windows. Quick start Give this prompt to your AI agent: Direct installation On Linux or macOS: On Windows, run in PowerShell: Showcase An HTML5 game rendered by Moli and inspected live through Chrome…
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or moli more popular?
crawlee has 26,327 GitHub stars and moli has 22,489. crawlee has the larger community by that measure.
Are crawlee and moli free?
Both are open source. crawlee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and moli under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between crawlee and moli?
crawlee is written in TypeScript and moli in Rust. 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 moli?
Choose crawlee if you want the larger community (26,327 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose moli if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.