head to head · open source
dots vs crawlee
dots has 31,817 GitHub stars, 4,695 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped today. crawlee has 26,051 stars, 1,690 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped today. dots leads on adoption by 22% (31,817 vs 26,051 stars). dots is written in TypeScript under MIT; crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. dots has attracted 15% as many forks as stars, crawlee 6%. dots was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (automation), 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
| dots | crawlee | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 26K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-10-08 | 2026-10-08 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.7K | ⑂ 1.7K |
| 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 crawlee if
- You want the crawlee feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and crawlee fits your workflow better
About dots
dots is an open source AI web agent that ships with its own anti detect Firefox browser, aimed at developers and automation engineers who need an agent to browse, log in and click through real websites without being blocked.
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is dots or crawlee more popular?
dots has 31,817 GitHub stars and crawlee has 26,051. dots has the larger community by that measure.
Are dots and crawlee free?
Both are open source. dots is licensed under MIT and crawlee under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between dots and crawlee?
dots is written in TypeScript and crawlee 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, dots or crawlee?
Choose dots if you want the larger community (31,817 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose crawlee if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.