head to head · open source
crawlee vs node-crawler
crawlee has 25,823 GitHub stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. node-crawler has 6,792 stars, 864 forks, 29 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 280% (25,823 vs 6,792 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; node-crawler is written in TypeScript under MIT. crawlee has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, node-crawler 13%. crawlee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (crawler, javascript, nodejs), 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 | node-crawler | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 6.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-06-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 864 |
| 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 node-crawler if
- You want the node-crawler feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and node-crawler 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 node-crawler
node crawler is a web crawler and spider library for Node.js that pairs a request queue with a server side DOM. It lives in the Node.js ecosystem and is published to npm under the package name crawler . The project is written in TypeScript and released under the MIT license, with 6,792 stars, 864 forks, and 29 open issues at the time of writing. The repository has been in development for 16 years and was last pushed on 18 June 2026. Version 2 is described as the advanced and TypeScript version of the original node crawler, and the topic list — cheerio, crawler, extract data, javascript, jquery, nodejs, spider — r…
read the full node-crawler overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or node-crawler more popular?
crawlee has 25,823 GitHub stars and node-crawler has 6,792. crawlee has the larger community by that measure.
Are crawlee and node-crawler free?
Both are open source. crawlee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and node-crawler under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between crawlee and node-crawler?
crawlee is written in TypeScript and node-crawler in TypeScript. 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 node-crawler?
Choose crawlee if you want the larger community (25,823 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose node-crawler if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.