head to head · open source
firecrawl vs crawlee
firecrawl has 197,942 GitHub stars, 10,457 forks, 621 open issues and last shipped yesterday. crawlee has 26,317 stars, 1,740 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. firecrawl leads on adoption by 652% (197,942 vs 26,317 stars). firecrawl is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. firecrawl has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, crawlee 7%. crawlee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (crawler, scraper), 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
| firecrawl | crawlee | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 198K | ★ 26K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 10K | ⑂ 1.7K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick firecrawl if
- You weight community size — 198K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick crawlee if
- You want the crawlee 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 crawlee fits your workflow better
About firecrawl
🔥 Firecrawl The API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale. 🔥 The web context API to find sources, extract content, and turn it into clean Markdown or structured data your agents can ship with. Open source and available as a hosted service. Pst. Hey, you, join our stargazers :) Why Firecrawl? Industry leading reliability : Covers 96% of the web, including JS heavy pages — no proxy headaches, just clean data (see benchmarks) Blazingly fast : P95 latency of 3.4s across millions of pages, built for real time agents and dynamic apps LLM ready output : Clean markdown, structured JSON, screenshots…
read the full firecrawl overview →
About crawlee
A web scraping and browser automation library Crawlee covers your crawling and scraping end to end and helps you build reliable scrapers. Fast. Your crawlers will appear human like and fly under the radar of modern bot protections even with the default configuration. Crawlee gives you the tools to crawl the web for links, scrape data, and store it to disk or cloud while staying configurable to suit your project's needs. Crawlee is available as the crawlee NPM package. 👉 View full documentation, guides and examples on the Crawlee project website 👈 Do you prefer 🐍 Python instead of JavaScript? 👉 Checkout…
read the full crawlee overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is firecrawl or crawlee more popular?
firecrawl has 197,942 GitHub stars and crawlee has 26,317. firecrawl has the larger community by that measure.
Are firecrawl and crawlee free?
Both are open source. firecrawl is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and crawlee under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between firecrawl and crawlee?
firecrawl is written in TypeScript and crawlee 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, firecrawl or crawlee?
Choose firecrawl if you want the larger community (197,942 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose crawlee if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.