head to head · open source
crawlee vs pydoll
crawlee has 26,317 GitHub stars, 1,740 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. pydoll has 7,132 stars, 413 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped 25 days ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 269% (26,317 vs 7,132 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; pydoll is written in HTML under MIT. crawlee has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, pydoll 6%. crawlee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 4 topic tags (automation, headless, playwright, puppeteer), 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| crawlee | pydoll | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 7.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | HTML |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 413 |
| 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 pydoll if
- You want the pydoll feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches HTML
- You evaluated both and pydoll 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 pydoll
The stealth first browser automation library for Python. No WebDriver, no navigator.webdriver flag, humanized clicks and typing. = 3.10" Documentation · Getting Started · Features · Support You have probably watched a scraper work on your machine, then hit a wall of captchas and Cloudflare challenges the moment it ran for real. That wall is what Pydoll is built around. It drives Chrome directly over the DevTools Protocol, so there is no WebDriver binary and no navigator.webdriver flag to give you away, and it clicks, types, and scrolls like a real person. That is often enough to get past the…
read the full pydoll overview →
More in Data & Analytics
Related comparisons
More Data Extraction & Web Scraping projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Data Extraction & Web Scraping field.
Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or pydoll more popular?
crawlee has 26,317 GitHub stars and pydoll has 7,132. crawlee has the larger community by that measure.
Are crawlee and pydoll free?
Both are open source. crawlee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and pydoll under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between crawlee and pydoll?
crawlee is written in TypeScript and pydoll in HTML. 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 pydoll?
Choose crawlee if you want the larger community (26,317 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose pydoll if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.