head to head · open source
EasySpider vs lux
EasySpider has 44,558 GitHub stars, 5,386 forks, 271 open issues and last shipped yesterday. lux has 31,686 stars, 3,312 forks, 545 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. EasySpider leads on adoption by 41% (44,558 vs 31,686 stars). EasySpider is written in JavaScript under AGPL-3.0; lux is written in Go under MIT. EasySpider has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, lux 10%. 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 | lux | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 45K | ★ 32K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | JavaScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-03-29 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.4K | ⑂ 3.3K |
| 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 lux if
- You want the lux feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and lux 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 lux
Lux is a video download library and command line tool written in Go, released under the MIT license. It ships as a single lux binary that takes one or more URLs and retrieves the underlying media streams, and it also exposes the downloading logic as a Go library that other programs can embed. The project has existed for roughly nine years and lives in the Go ecosystem, distributed through go install alongside the usual operating system package managers.
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Frequently asked questions
Is EasySpider or lux more popular?
EasySpider has 44,558 GitHub stars and lux has 31,686. EasySpider has the larger community by that measure.
Are EasySpider and lux free?
Both are open source. EasySpider is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and lux under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between EasySpider and lux?
EasySpider is written in JavaScript and lux 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 lux?
Choose EasySpider if you want the larger community (44,558 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose lux if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.