head to head · open source
EasySpider vs crawlee
EasySpider has 44,558 GitHub stars, 5,386 forks, 271 open issues and last shipped yesterday. crawlee has 25,823 stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. EasySpider leads on adoption by 73% (44,558 vs 25,823 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 6%. 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| EasySpider | crawlee | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 45K | ★ 26K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | JavaScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| 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
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 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 →
More in Data & Analytics
Related comparisons
More Data Extraction & Web Scraping projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Data Extraction & Web Scraping field.
Frequently asked questions
Is EasySpider or crawlee more popular?
EasySpider has 44,558 GitHub stars and crawlee has 25,823. 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 (44,558 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.