head to head · open source
crawlee vs stagehand
crawlee has 26,312 GitHub stars, 1,739 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. stagehand has 25,900 stars, 1,803 forks, 376 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 2% (26,312 vs 25,900 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; stagehand is written in TypeScript under MIT. crawlee has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, stagehand 7%. crawlee 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| crawlee | stagehand | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 26K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 1.8K |
| 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
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 stagehand
Stagehand is the SDK to extract data and interact with any site on the web. Playwright was built for testing. Stagehand is built for agents, in TypeScript, Python, and Go. Docs · Quickstart · ⭐ Star this repo AI that uses the browser like humans. Sign in once, keep the session, and pull structured data out the other side. Python Go Install Python Go Local runs need Chrome installed. Full setup: Quickstart. Why Stagehand Token efficiency Hybrid accessibilit
read the full stagehand 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 stagehand more popular?
crawlee has 26,312 GitHub stars and stagehand has 25,900. 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 (26,312 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose stagehand if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.