head to head · open source
crawlee vs reader
crawlee has 25,841 GitHub stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. reader has 561 stars, 40 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 4,506% (25,841 vs 561 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; reader is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. crawlee has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, reader 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 (crawler), 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 | reader | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 561 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-08-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 40 |
| 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 reader if
- You want the reader feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and reader 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 reader
Reader is an Apache 2.0 TypeScript library and hosted service that scrapes, crawls, and drives stealth headless browsers to deliver clean Markdown to AI agents, built for developers who need production grade web access without assembling Puppeteer, stealth plugins, and proxy infrastructure by hand.
read the full reader overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or reader more popular?
crawlee has 25,841 GitHub stars and reader has 561. crawlee has the larger community by that measure.
Are crawlee and reader free?
Both are open source. crawlee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and reader under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between crawlee and reader?
crawlee is written in TypeScript and reader in TypeScript. 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 reader?
Choose crawlee if you want the larger community (25,841 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose reader if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.