head to head · open source
EasySpider vs node-crawler
EasySpider has 44,765 GitHub stars, 5,392 forks, 271 open issues and last shipped yesterday. node-crawler has 6,796 stars, 862 forks, 29 open issues and last shipped 5 months ago. EasySpider leads on adoption by 559% (44,765 vs 6,796 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 | 2026-11-02 | 2026-06-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.4K | ⑂ 862 |
| 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
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 node-crawler
[![NPM download][download image]][download url] [![Package Quality][quality image]][quality url] [quality image]: [quality url]: [download image]: [download url]: Crawler v2 : Advanced and Typescript version of node crawler Features: Server side DOM & automatic jQuery insertion with Cheerio (default), Configurable pool size and retries, Control rate limit, Priority queue of requests, let crawler deal for you with charset detection and conversion, If you have prior experience with Crawler v1, for fast migration, please proceed to the section Differences and Breaking Changes. Use with AI agents This package ships…
read the full node-crawler overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is EasySpider or node-crawler more popular?
EasySpider has 44,765 GitHub stars and node-crawler has 6,796. 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 (44,765 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.