head to head · open source
crawlee vs trafilatura
crawlee has 25,823 GitHub stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. trafilatura has 6,832 stars, 431 forks, 60 open issues and last shipped 7 days ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 278% (25,823 vs 6,832 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; trafilatura is written in Python under Apache-2.0. crawlee has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, trafilatura 6%. crawlee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (crawler), 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 | trafilatura | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 6.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 431 |
| 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 trafilatura if
- You want the trafilatura feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and trafilatura 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 trafilatura
Trafilatura is a Python package and command line tool that crawls the web and turns raw HTML into structured text and metadata, built for developers, researchers, and data teams assembling corpora, news feeds, or retrieval augmented generation datasets.
read the full trafilatura 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 trafilatura more popular?
crawlee has 25,823 GitHub stars and trafilatura has 6,832. crawlee has the larger community by that measure.
Are crawlee and trafilatura free?
Both are open source. crawlee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and trafilatura under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between crawlee and trafilatura?
crawlee is written in TypeScript and trafilatura 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 trafilatura?
Choose crawlee if you want the larger community (25,823 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose trafilatura if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.