head to head · open source
EasySpider vs webclaw
EasySpider has 44,565 GitHub stars, 5,387 forks, 271 open issues and last shipped yesterday. webclaw has 2,352 stars, 231 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped yesterday. EasySpider leads on adoption by 1,795% (44,565 vs 2,352 stars). EasySpider is written in JavaScript under AGPL-3.0; webclaw is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0. EasySpider has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, webclaw 10%. EasySpider 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 | webclaw | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 45K | ★ 2.4K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | JavaScript | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.4K | ⑂ 231 |
| 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 webclaw if
- You want the webclaw feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and webclaw 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 webclaw
English 简体中文 webclaw Turn websites into clean markdown, JSON, and LLM ready context. CLI, MCP server, REST API, and SDKs for AI agents and RAG pipelines. Most web scraping tools give your agent one of two bad outputs: a blocked page, login wall, or empty app shell raw HTML full of nav, scripts, styling, ads, and duplicated boilerplate webclaw.io is the hosted web extraction API for webclaw. This repo contains the open source CLI, MCP server, extraction engine, and self hostable server. webclaw turns a URL into clean content your tools can actually use. Use it from the terminal, wire it into Claude/Cursor through …
read the full webclaw overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is EasySpider or webclaw more popular?
EasySpider has 44,565 GitHub stars and webclaw has 2,352. EasySpider has the larger community by that measure.
Are EasySpider and webclaw free?
Both are open source. EasySpider is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and webclaw under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between EasySpider and webclaw?
EasySpider is written in JavaScript and webclaw in Rust. 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 webclaw?
Choose EasySpider if you want the larger community (44,565 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose webclaw if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.