head to head · open source
EasySpider vs crawlee
EasySpider has 44,765 GitHub stars, 5,392 forks, 271 open issues and last shipped yesterday. crawlee has 26,317 stars, 1,740 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. EasySpider leads on adoption by 70% (44,765 vs 26,317 stars). EasySpider is written in JavaScript under AGPL-3.0; crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. EasySpider has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, crawlee 7%. crawlee 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 | crawlee | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 45K | ★ 26K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | JavaScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.4K | ⑂ 1.7K |
| 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 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 EasySpider
易采集/EasySpider: Visual Code Free Web Crawler 一个 完全免费 （ 包括商业使用和二次开发 ）的可视化浏览器自动化测试/数据采集/爬虫软件，可以使用图形化界面，无代码可视化的设计和执行任务。只需要在网页上选择自己想要操作的内容并根据提示框操作即可完成任务的设计和执行。同时软件还可以单独以命令行的方式进行执行，从而可以很方便的嵌入到其他系统中。 A completely free (including for commercial use and secondary development) visual browser automation test/data collection/crawler software, which can be used to design and execute tasks in a code free visual way. You only need to select the content you want to operate on the web page and follow the prompts to complete the design and execution of the task. At the same time, the software can also be executed separately in…
read the full EasySpider overview →
About crawlee
A web scraping and browser automation library Crawlee covers your crawling and scraping end to end and helps you build reliable scrapers. Fast. Your crawlers will appear human like and fly under the radar of modern bot protections even with the default configuration. Crawlee gives you the tools to crawl the web for links, scrape data, and store it to disk or cloud while staying configurable to suit your project's needs. Crawlee is available as the crawlee NPM package. 👉 View full documentation, guides and examples on the Crawlee project website 👈 Do you prefer 🐍 Python instead of JavaScript? 👉 Checkout…
read the full crawlee overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is EasySpider or crawlee more popular?
EasySpider has 44,765 GitHub stars and crawlee has 26,317. EasySpider has the larger community by that measure.
Are EasySpider and crawlee free?
Both are open source. EasySpider is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and crawlee under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between EasySpider and crawlee?
EasySpider is written in JavaScript 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, EasySpider or crawlee?
Choose EasySpider if you want the larger community (44,765 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose crawlee if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.