head to head · open source
crawlee vs pydoll
crawlee has 25,823 GitHub stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. pydoll has 7,088 stars, 406 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 264% (25,823 vs 7,088 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; pydoll is written in HTML under MIT. crawlee has attracted 6% 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 5 topic tags (automation, crawler, headless, playwright), 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 | pydoll | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 7.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | HTML |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 406 |
| 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
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 pydoll
Pydoll is a stealth first Python library that automates Chromium based browsers directly over the DevTools Protocol, without a WebDriver, for developers who scrape, test, or automate sites that block ordinary bots.
read the full pydoll overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or pydoll more popular?
crawlee has 25,823 GitHub stars and pydoll has 7,088. 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 (25,823 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose pydoll if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.