head to head · open source
crawlee vs spider
crawlee has 26,327 GitHub stars, 1,742 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. spider has 2,820 stars, 322 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 834% (26,327 vs 2,820 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; spider is written in Rust under MIT. crawlee has attracted 7% 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 | ★ 2.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 322 |
| 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
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 spider
Spider The fastest web crawler and scraper for Rust. spider.cloud · Guides · Docs · Examples · Discord Spider is a concurrency first crawling engine written in Rust. It streams pages as they arrive, renders JavaScript only on pages that need it, and scales from a single script to a distributed fleet without changing your code. The same engine runs Spider Cloud, so you can prototype locally and move to managed infrastructure with one config change. Start in the cloud The hardest part of crawling at scale isn't the code. It's the proxies, headless browsers, and constant anti bot churn. Spider Cloud runs all of…
read the full spider overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or spider more popular?
crawlee has 26,327 GitHub stars and spider has 2,820. 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 (26,327 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose spider if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.