head to head · open source
crawlee vs skills
crawlee has 26,317 GitHub stars, 1,740 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. skills has 6,310 stars, 339 forks, 7 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 317% (26,317 vs 6,310 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; skills is written in Python under MIT. crawlee has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, skills 5%. crawlee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (automation), 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 | skills | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 6.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-08-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 339 |
| 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 skills if
- You want the skills feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and skills 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 skills
What can BrowserAct be used for? BrowserAct enables AI agents and teams to perform real browser automation, web data extraction, and account based workflows. It helps agents get past anti bot walls, hand off to humans across platforms when stuck, run parallel tasks without cross contamination, and isolate multiple accounts in independent browsers, backed by stealth fingerprints, TLS rotation, residential proxies, CAPTCHA solving, and stable fingerprint proxy setups for authenticated sessions. Two usage modes are available: fully cloud managed execution, or local browser control driven by your own agent workflow…
read the full skills overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or skills more popular?
crawlee has 26,317 GitHub stars and skills has 6,310. crawlee has the larger community by that measure.
Are crawlee and skills free?
Both are open source. crawlee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and skills under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between crawlee and skills?
crawlee is written in TypeScript and skills 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 skills?
Choose crawlee if you want the larger community (26,317 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose skills if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.