head to head · open source
dots vs deepcrawl
dots has 32,357 GitHub stars, 4,739 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. deepcrawl has 696 stars, 82 forks, 2 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. dots leads on adoption by 4,549% (32,357 vs 696 stars). dots is written in TypeScript under MIT; deepcrawl is written in TypeScript under MIT. dots has attracted 15% as many forks as stars, deepcrawl 12%. 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 | deepcrawl | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 696 |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-10-31 | 2026-08-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.7K | ⑂ 82 |
| 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 deepcrawl if
- You want the deepcrawl feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and deepcrawl 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 deepcrawl
Deepcrawl WARNING: DO NOT USE DEEPCRAWL IN PRODUCTION RIGHT NOW AS IT IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE AND STILL UNDER RAPID DEVELOPMENT. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK! 100% free and open source Firecrawl alternative with better performance and flexibility. Ask DeepWiki about this repo NOTE: DeepCrawl doesn’t target anti scraping or anti bot purposes. It’s optimized for high‑frequency agent workloads that scrape public pages to extract cleaned Markdown and a hierarchical links tree. Deepcrawl is an agent oriented website data context extraction platform. It extracts cleaned markdown of page content, agent favoured hierarchical links…
read the full deepcrawl overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is dots or deepcrawl more popular?
dots has 32,357 GitHub stars and deepcrawl has 696. dots has the larger community by that measure.
Are dots and deepcrawl free?
Both are open source. dots is licensed under MIT and deepcrawl under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between dots and deepcrawl?
dots is written in TypeScript and deepcrawl 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 deepcrawl?
Choose dots if you want the larger community (32,357 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose deepcrawl if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.