head to head · open source
crawlee vs moli
crawlee has 25,841 GitHub stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. moli has 2,124 stars, 144 forks, 126 open issues and last shipped today. crawlee leads on adoption by 1,117% (25,841 vs 2,124 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; moli is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. crawlee has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, moli 7%. moli was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (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 | ★ 2.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 144 |
| 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
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 moli
Moli is a production ready, Rust built headless browser for AI agents that lets an agent fetch and extract web pages, search the web, and automate browser tasks through a CLI or the CDP, WebDriver Classic, and WebDriver BiDi protocols.
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or moli more popular?
crawlee has 25,841 GitHub stars and moli has 2,124. 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 (25,841 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.