head to head · open source
crawlee vs node-crawler
crawlee has 26,317 GitHub stars, 1,740 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. node-crawler has 6,796 stars, 862 forks, 29 open issues and last shipped 5 months ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 287% (26,317 vs 6,796 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; node-crawler is written in TypeScript under MIT. crawlee has attracted 7% 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 | 2026-11-02 | 2026-06-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 862 |
| 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
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 node-crawler
[![NPM download][download image]][download url] [![Package Quality][quality image]][quality url] [quality image]: [quality url]: [download image]: [download url]: Crawler v2 : Advanced and Typescript version of node crawler Features: Server side DOM & automatic jQuery insertion with Cheerio (default), Configurable pool size and retries, Control rate limit, Priority queue of requests, let crawler deal for you with charset detection and conversion, If you have prior experience with Crawler v1, for fast migration, please proceed to the section Differences and Breaking Changes. Use with AI agents This package ships…
read the full node-crawler overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or node-crawler more popular?
crawlee has 26,317 GitHub stars and node-crawler has 6,796. 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 (26,317 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.