head to head · open source
crawlee vs reverse-api-engineer
crawlee has 25,841 GitHub stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. reverse-api-engineer has 1,174 stars, 107 forks, 12 open issues and last shipped 21 days ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 2,101% (25,841 vs 1,174 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; reverse-api-engineer is written in Python under MIT. crawlee has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, reverse-api-engineer 9%. 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 | ★ 1.2K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-08-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 107 |
| 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
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 reverse-api-engineer
Reverse API Engineer is an MIT licensed Python CLI and agent that turns a website into a typed API client by capturing the site's own network traffic and having a language model write the client from it, built for developers who need programmatic access to a site that offers no usable public API.
read the full reverse-api-engineer overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or reverse-api-engineer more popular?
crawlee has 25,841 GitHub stars and reverse-api-engineer has 1,174. 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 (25,841 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.