head to head · open source
crawlee vs PHPScraper
crawlee has 25,841 GitHub stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. PHPScraper has 588 stars, 75 forks, 28 open issues and last shipped 12 days ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 4,295% (25,841 vs 588 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; PHPScraper is written in PHP under GPL-3.0. crawlee has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, PHPScraper 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 (headless-chrome, puppeteer, scraper), 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 | PHPScraper | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 588 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-08 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 75 |
| 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 PHPScraper if
- You want the PHPScraper feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and PHPScraper 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 PHPScraper
PHPScraper is a GPL 3.0 PHP web utility for developers who need to extract structured information such as titles, metadata, social tags, headings, lists, images, links, keywords, and downloadable assets from websites without writing selectors or manually preparing the extracted data.
read the full PHPScraper overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or PHPScraper more popular?
crawlee has 25,841 GitHub stars and PHPScraper has 588. crawlee has the larger community by that measure.
Are crawlee and PHPScraper free?
Both are open source. crawlee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and PHPScraper under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between crawlee and PHPScraper?
crawlee is written in TypeScript and PHPScraper in PHP. 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 PHPScraper?
Choose crawlee if you want the larger community (25,841 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose PHPScraper if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.