head to head · open source
crawlee vs x-crawl
crawlee has 25,841 GitHub stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. x-crawl has 1,883 stars, 116 forks, 16 open issues and last shipped yesterday. crawlee leads on adoption by 1,272% (25,841 vs 1,883 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; x-crawl is written in TypeScript under MIT. crawlee has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, x-crawl 6%. x-crawl was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 4 topic tags (crawler, javascript, nodejs, puppeteer), 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 | x-crawl | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 1.9K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 116 |
| 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 x-crawl if
- You want the x-crawl feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and x-crawl 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 x-crawl
x crawl is a flexible, MIT licensed Node.js and TypeScript crawler library that pairs a conventional scraping API with optional AI assistance through Ollama and OpenAI, built for developers who need to pull data from dynamic pages, static pages, interface responses, and files under one consistent interface.
read the full x-crawl overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or x-crawl more popular?
crawlee has 25,841 GitHub stars and x-crawl has 1,883. crawlee has the larger community by that measure.
Are crawlee and x-crawl free?
Both are open source. crawlee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and x-crawl under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between crawlee and x-crawl?
crawlee is written in TypeScript and x-crawl 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 x-crawl?
Choose crawlee if you want the larger community (25,841 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose x-crawl if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.