head to head · open source
crawlee vs skills
crawlee has 25,823 GitHub stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. skills has 5,946 stars, 295 forks, 7 open issues and last shipped 25 days ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 334% (25,823 vs 5,946 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; skills is written in Python under MIT. crawlee has attracted 6% 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| crawlee | skills | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 5.9K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 295 |
| 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
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 skills
BrowserAct Skills is a browser automation CLI built for AI agents, distributed as an open source Python project under the MIT license. It lives in the agent infrastructure ecosystem, alongside tooling for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and other agent clients, and it is catalogued here under Data Extraction and Web Scraping. The project has gathered roughly 5,900 stars and 293 forks since it was published about a year ago, with a small open issue count and an active last push.
read the full skills overview →
More in Data & Analytics
Related comparisons
More Data Extraction & Web Scraping projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Data Extraction & Web Scraping field.
Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or skills more popular?
crawlee has 25,823 GitHub stars and skills has 5,946. 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 (25,823 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose skills if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.