head to head · open source
crawlee vs pinchtab
crawlee has 26,335 GitHub stars, 1,746 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. pinchtab has 10,553 stars, 791 forks, 4 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 150% (26,335 vs 10,553 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; pinchtab is written in Go under MIT. crawlee has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, pinchtab 7%. crawlee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (headless-chrome), 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 | pinchtab | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 11K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 791 |
| 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 pinchtab if
- You want the pinchtab feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and pinchtab 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 pinchtab
PinchTab Browser control for AI agents Small Go binary • HTTP API • Token efficient What is PinchTab? PinchTab is a standalone HTTP server that gives AI agents direct control over Chrome. For day to day local use, the server is typically installed as a user level daemon, allowing agent tools to reuse the same browser control plane running in the background. This installs the control plane server and starts a default headless Chrome instance, ready to accept requests from agents or manual API calls. PinchTab is designed first for local, single user control on a machine you manage. Remote and distributed layouts…
read the full pinchtab overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or pinchtab more popular?
crawlee has 26,335 GitHub stars and pinchtab has 10,553. crawlee has the larger community by that measure.
Are crawlee and pinchtab free?
Both are open source. crawlee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and pinchtab under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between crawlee and pinchtab?
crawlee is written in TypeScript and pinchtab in Go. 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 pinchtab?
Choose crawlee if you want the larger community (26,335 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose pinchtab if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.