head to head · open source
crawlee vs trafilatura
crawlee has 26,317 GitHub stars, 1,740 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. trafilatura has 7,061 stars, 488 forks, 60 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 273% (26,317 vs 7,061 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; trafilatura is written in Python under Apache-2.0. crawlee has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, trafilatura 7%. 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.
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Side by side
| crawlee | trafilatura | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 7.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 488 |
| 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
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 trafilatura
Trafilatura: Discover Web Content, Extract Text and Metadata Introduction Trafilatura is a comprehensive Python package and command line tool designed to gather text from the Web and turn raw HTML into structured, meaningful data . It includes all necessary discovery and text processing components to perform web crawling, downloads, scraping, and extraction of main texts, metadata and comments. It aims at staying handy and modular : no database is required, the output can be converted to commonly used formats. Going from raw HTML to essential parts, it focuses on the actual content , avoids noise caused by…
read the full trafilatura overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or trafilatura more popular?
crawlee has 26,317 GitHub stars and trafilatura has 7,061. 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 (26,317 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.