head to head · open source
crawlee vs PHPScraper
crawlee has 26,327 GitHub stars, 1,742 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. PHPScraper has 588 stars, 74 forks, 28 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 4,377% (26,327 vs 588 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; PHPScraper is written in PHP under GPL-3.0. crawlee has attracted 7% 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 | 2026-11-04 | 2026-09-08 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 74 |
| 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
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 PHPScraper
For full documentation, visit phpscraper.de . PHPScraper is a versatile web utility for PHP. Its primary objective is to streamline the process of extracting information from websites, allowing you to focus on accomplishing tasks without getting caught up in the complexities of selectors, data structure preparation, and conversion. Under the hood, it uses BrowserKit (formerly Goutte) to access the web League/URI to process URLs donatello za/rake php plus to extract and analyze keywords See composer.json for more details. :timer clock: PHPScraper in 5 Minutes explained Here are a few impressions of the way the…
read the full PHPScraper overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or PHPScraper more popular?
crawlee has 26,327 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 (26,327 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.