head to head · open source
EasySpider vs crawlab
EasySpider has 44,558 GitHub stars, 5,386 forks, 271 open issues and last shipped yesterday. crawlab has 12,273 stars, 1,890 forks, 166 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. EasySpider leads on adoption by 263% (44,558 vs 12,273 stars). EasySpider is written in JavaScript under AGPL-3.0; crawlab is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause. EasySpider has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, crawlab 15%. EasySpider was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (crawler), 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
| EasySpider | crawlab | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 45K | ★ 12K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | JavaScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-02-10 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.4K | ⑂ 1.9K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick EasySpider if
- You weight community size — 45K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- 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 EasySpider
EasySpider is a visual, code free web crawler and browser automation tool distributed on GitHub under the AGPL 3.0 license. It is written in JavaScript as a graphical application and lives in the web scraping and data extraction ecosystem, sitting alongside browser automation testing tools. It also carries the alias ServiceWrapper, described as an intelligent service encapsulation system for web applications. Development spans roughly six years, with the latest push recorded in September 2026.
read the full EasySpider overview →
About crawlab
Crawlab is a BSD 3 Clause licensed, Go based distributed web crawler admin platform that manages spiders regardless of the language or framework they are written in, built for teams that run many crawlers and need one place to schedule, monitor, and inspect them.
read the full crawlab overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is EasySpider or crawlab more popular?
EasySpider has 44,558 GitHub stars and crawlab has 12,273. EasySpider has the larger community by that measure.
Are EasySpider and crawlab free?
Both are open source. EasySpider is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and crawlab under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between EasySpider and crawlab?
EasySpider is written in JavaScript 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, EasySpider or crawlab?
Choose EasySpider if you want the larger community (44,558 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose crawlab if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.