head to head · open source
dots vs crawlab
dots has 32,357 GitHub stars, 4,739 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. crawlab has 12,290 stars, 1,884 forks, 166 open issues and last shipped 9 months ago. dots leads on adoption by 163% (32,357 vs 12,290 stars). dots is written in TypeScript under MIT; crawlab is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause. dots has attracted 15% as many forks as stars, crawlab 15%. dots was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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
| dots | crawlab | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 12K |
| License | MIT | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-31 | 2026-02-10 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.7K | ⑂ 1.9K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick dots if
- You weight community size — 32K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick crawlab if
- You want the crawlab feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and crawlab fits your workflow better
About dots
dots Every AI agent is a model and a browser. You can swap the model with one flag. The browser is what the website sees. Windows, in PowerShell: Linux: Then open The conversation on the left, the browser on the right, live. It all comes down to the browser When a web agent fails, the model is rarely why. The page never loaded, a challenge appeared, the login expired, the click did not land. All of that happens in the browser, before the model gets to think. So dots is built around one: A real Firefox engine, patched in C++. The fingerprint is decided inside the engine, not painted over with JavaScript that a…
About crawlab
Crawlab 中文 English Installation Run Screenshot Architecture Integration Compare Community & Sponsorship CHANGELOG Disclaimer Golang based distributed web crawler management platform, supporting various languages including Python, NodeJS, Go, Java, PHP and various web crawler frameworks including Scrapy, Puppeteer, Selenium. Demo Documentation Installation You can follow the installation guide. Quick Start Please open the command line prompt and execute the command below. Make sure you have installed docker compose in advance. Next, you can look into the docker compose.yml (with detailed config params) and the…
read the full crawlab overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is dots or crawlab more popular?
dots has 32,357 GitHub stars and crawlab has 12,290. dots has the larger community by that measure.
Are dots and crawlab free?
Both are open source. dots is licensed under MIT and crawlab under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between dots and crawlab?
dots is written in TypeScript and crawlab in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, dots or crawlab?
Choose dots if you want the larger community (32,357 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose crawlab if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.