head to head · open source
EasySpider vs node-crawler
EasySpider has 44,558 GitHub stars, 5,386 forks, 271 open issues and last shipped yesterday. node-crawler has 6,792 stars, 864 forks, 29 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. EasySpider leads on adoption by 556% (44,558 vs 6,792 stars). EasySpider is written in JavaScript under AGPL-3.0; node-crawler is written in TypeScript under MIT. EasySpider has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, node-crawler 13%. 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 | node-crawler | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 45K | ★ 6.8K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | JavaScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-06-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.4K | ⑂ 864 |
| 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 node-crawler if
- You want the node-crawler feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and node-crawler 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 node-crawler
node crawler is a web crawler and spider library for Node.js that pairs a request queue with a server side DOM. It lives in the Node.js ecosystem and is published to npm under the package name crawler . The project is written in TypeScript and released under the MIT license, with 6,792 stars, 864 forks, and 29 open issues at the time of writing. The repository has been in development for 16 years and was last pushed on 18 June 2026. Version 2 is described as the advanced and TypeScript version of the original node crawler, and the topic list — cheerio, crawler, extract data, javascript, jquery, nodejs, spider — r…
read the full node-crawler overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is EasySpider or node-crawler more popular?
EasySpider has 44,558 GitHub stars and node-crawler has 6,792. EasySpider has the larger community by that measure.
Are EasySpider and node-crawler free?
Both are open source. EasySpider is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and node-crawler under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between EasySpider and node-crawler?
EasySpider is written in JavaScript and node-crawler 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 node-crawler?
Choose EasySpider if you want the larger community (44,558 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose node-crawler if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.