head to head · open source
dots vs webclaw
dots has 32,357 GitHub stars, 4,739 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. webclaw has 2,422 stars, 240 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped yesterday. dots leads on adoption by 1,236% (32,357 vs 2,422 stars). dots is written in TypeScript under MIT; webclaw is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0. dots has attracted 15% as many forks as stars, webclaw 10%. webclaw was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (ai-agents), 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 | webclaw | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 2.4K |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-10-31 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.7K | ⑂ 240 |
| 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 webclaw if
- You want the webclaw feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and webclaw 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 webclaw
English 简体中文 webclaw Turn websites into clean markdown, JSON, and LLM ready context. CLI, MCP server, REST API, and SDKs for AI agents and RAG pipelines. Most web scraping tools give your agent one of two bad outputs: a blocked page, login wall, or empty app shell raw HTML full of nav, scripts, styling, ads, and duplicated boilerplate webclaw.io is the hosted web extraction API for webclaw. This repo contains the open source CLI, MCP server, extraction engine, and self hostable server. webclaw turns a URL into clean content your tools can actually use. Use it from the terminal, wire it into Claude/Cursor through…
read the full webclaw overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is dots or webclaw more popular?
dots has 32,357 GitHub stars and webclaw has 2,422. dots has the larger community by that measure.
Are dots and webclaw free?
Both are open source. dots is licensed under MIT and webclaw under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between dots and webclaw?
dots is written in TypeScript and webclaw in Rust. 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 webclaw?
Choose dots if you want the larger community (32,357 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose webclaw if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.