head to head · open source
crawlee vs spider
crawlee has 25,841 GitHub stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. spider has 2,724 stars, 302 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 849% (25,841 vs 2,724 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; spider is written in Rust under MIT. crawlee has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, spider 11%. crawlee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (automation, crawler, headless-chrome), 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 | spider | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 2.7K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 302 |
| 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 spider if
- You want the spider feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and spider 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 spider
Spider is a concurrency first web crawling and scraping engine written in Rust, licensed under MIT, and aimed at developers and data teams that need to collect web data with low latency, from a single script up to a distributed fleet.
read the full spider overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or spider more popular?
crawlee has 25,841 GitHub stars and spider has 2,724. crawlee has the larger community by that measure.
Are crawlee and spider free?
Both are open source. crawlee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and spider under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between crawlee and spider?
crawlee is written in TypeScript and spider in Rust. 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 spider?
Choose crawlee if you want the larger community (25,841 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose spider if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.