head to head · open source
EasySpider vs trawl
EasySpider has 44,765 GitHub stars, 5,392 forks, 271 open issues and last shipped yesterday. trawl has 1,096 stars, 65 forks, 7 open issues and last shipped yesterday. EasySpider leads on adoption by 3,984% (44,765 vs 1,096 stars). EasySpider is written in JavaScript under AGPL-3.0; trawl is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0. EasySpider has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, trawl 6%. trawl was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | trawl | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 45K | ★ 1.1K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | JavaScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.4K | ⑂ 65 |
| 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 trawl if
- You want the trawl feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and trawl 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 trawl
TRAWL Welcome to TRAWL ! 👋 Self hosted web scraping engine with best effort JS challenge and CAPTCHA solving.\ Dedicated flows for Cloudflare, Akamai Bot Manager, and Imperva/Incapsula (best effort), plus Turnstile, reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha, GeeTest, ALTCHA, and Friendly Captcha.\ Much faster and more reliable FlareSolverr & Byparr alternative and drop in replacement for your \ arr stack. Features 2 6x faster compared to FlareSolverr or Byparr it returns much faster with higher success rate 4 tier execution plain HTTP fetch → cached browser session → fresh challenge solve → residential proxy Challenge aware…
read the full trawl overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is EasySpider or trawl more popular?
EasySpider has 44,765 GitHub stars and trawl has 1,096. EasySpider has the larger community by that measure.
Are EasySpider and trawl free?
Both are open source. EasySpider is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and trawl under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between EasySpider and trawl?
EasySpider is written in JavaScript and trawl 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 trawl?
Choose EasySpider if you want the larger community (44,765 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose trawl if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.