head to head · open source
crawlee vs stagehand
crawlee has 25,823 GitHub stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. stagehand has 24,322 stars, 1,685 forks, 376 open issues and last shipped yesterday. crawlee leads on adoption by 6% (25,823 vs 24,322 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; stagehand is written in TypeScript under MIT. crawlee has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, stagehand 7%. stagehand was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (headless-chrome, 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 | stagehand | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 24K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 1.7K |
| 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 stagehand if
- You want the stagehand feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and stagehand 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 stagehand
Stagehand is the MIT licensed SDK for extracting data and interacting with any site on the web, available in TypeScript, Python, and Go, and aimed at developers building AI agents that need to drive a browser the way a person does rather than at engineers writing test suites.
read the full stagehand overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or stagehand more popular?
crawlee has 25,823 GitHub stars and stagehand has 24,322. crawlee has the larger community by that measure.
Are crawlee and stagehand free?
Both are open source. crawlee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and stagehand under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between crawlee and stagehand?
crawlee is written in TypeScript and stagehand in TypeScript. 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 stagehand?
Choose crawlee if you want the larger community (25,823 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose stagehand if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.