head to head · open source
crawlee vs reader
crawlee has 26,327 GitHub stars, 1,742 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. reader has 561 stars, 41 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 4,593% (26,327 vs 561 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; reader is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. crawlee has attracted 7% 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 | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 41 |
| 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
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 reader
Reader Open source web infrastructure for AI. Access the web without the complexity. Docs · Examples · Discord The Problem Building agents that need web access is frustrating. You piece together Puppeteer, add stealth plugins, fight Cloudflare, manage proxies and it still breaks in production. Because production grade web scraping isn't about rendering a page and converting HTML to markdown. It's about everything underneath: I built Reader , a production grade web scraping engine on top of Playwright, with stealth and anti detection built in from the ground up. The Solution Three primitives. That's it. All the…
read the full reader overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or reader more popular?
crawlee has 26,327 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 (26,327 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.