head to head · open source
crawlee vs pinchtab
crawlee has 25,841 GitHub stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. pinchtab has 10,274 stars, 774 forks, 4 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 152% (25,841 vs 10,274 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; pinchtab is written in Go under MIT. crawlee has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, pinchtab 8%. 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 | ★ 10K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-15 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 774 |
| 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
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 pinchtab
PinchTab is a standalone HTTP server written in Go that gives AI agents direct control over Chrome, aimed at developers and operators who run browser automation on a machine they manage themselves.
read the full pinchtab overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or pinchtab more popular?
crawlee has 25,841 GitHub stars and pinchtab has 10,274. 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 (25,841 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose pinchtab if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.