head to head · open source
EasySpider vs reader
EasySpider has 44,765 GitHub stars, 5,392 forks, 271 open issues and last shipped yesterday. reader has 561 stars, 41 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped 28 days ago. EasySpider leads on adoption by 7,880% (44,765 vs 561 stars). EasySpider is written in JavaScript under AGPL-3.0; reader is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. EasySpider has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, reader 7%. 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| EasySpider | reader | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 45K | ★ 561 |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | JavaScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.4K | ⑂ 41 |
| 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 reader if
- You want the reader 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 reader 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 reader
Reader Open source web infrastructure for AI. Access the web without the complexity. Docs · Examples · Discord The Problem Building agents that need web access is frustrating. You piece together Puppeteer, add stealth plugins, fight Cloudflare, manage proxies and it still breaks in production. Because production grade web scraping isn't about rendering a page and converting HTML to markdown. It's about everything underneath: I built Reader , a production grade web scraping engine on top of Playwright, with stealth and anti detection built in from the ground up. The Solution Three primitives. That's it. All the…
read the full reader 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 reader more popular?
EasySpider has 44,765 GitHub stars and reader has 561. EasySpider has the larger community by that measure.
Are EasySpider and reader free?
Both are open source. EasySpider is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and reader under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between EasySpider and reader?
EasySpider is written in JavaScript and reader 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 reader?
Choose EasySpider if you want the larger community (44,765 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose reader if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.