head to head · open source
crawlee vs reverse-api-engineer
crawlee has 26,335 GitHub stars, 1,746 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. reverse-api-engineer has 2,609 stars, 269 forks, 12 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 909% (26,335 vs 2,609 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; reverse-api-engineer is written in Python under MIT. crawlee has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, reverse-api-engineer 10%. crawlee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (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 | reverse-api-engineer | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 2.6K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 269 |
| 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 reverse-api-engineer if
- You want the reverse-api-engineer feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and reverse-api-engineer 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 reverse-api-engineer
Reverse API Engineer Turn websites into APIs. Browse (or let an agent browse), and get a clean, typed client for the endpoints the site actually uses. Agent mode Manual mode How it works 1. You give it a website and a goal ("fetch all Apple jobs"). 2. A browser visits the site, either driven by you or by an AI agent. 3. Network traffic is captured to a HAR file. 4. Your configured model reads the traffic and writes a working API client in Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Go, Java, C , PHP, Ruby, or C. No more manually opening DevTools, copying cURL commands, and gluing together a client. Install Agent mode (the…
read the full reverse-api-engineer overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or reverse-api-engineer more popular?
crawlee has 26,335 GitHub stars and reverse-api-engineer has 2,609. crawlee has the larger community by that measure.
Are crawlee and reverse-api-engineer free?
Both are open source. crawlee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and reverse-api-engineer under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between crawlee and reverse-api-engineer?
crawlee is written in TypeScript and reverse-api-engineer in Python. 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 reverse-api-engineer?
Choose crawlee if you want the larger community (26,335 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose reverse-api-engineer if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.