head to head · open source
firecrawl vs crawlee
firecrawl has 181,744 GitHub stars, 9,838 forks, 621 open issues and last shipped today. crawlee has 25,828 stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. firecrawl leads on adoption by 604% (181,744 vs 25,828 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 6%. firecrawl 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 | ★ 182K | ★ 26K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.8K | ⑂ 1.7K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick firecrawl if
- You weight community size — 182K 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 is an open source web context API that enables AI agents to search, scrape, and interact with websites at scale. It lives in the AI and data extraction ecosystem, providing structured, LLM ready outputs from unstructured web content. Built in TypeScript and licensed under AGPL 3.0, it supports both self hosting and a hosted service via firecrawl.dev.
read the full firecrawl overview →
About crawlee
Crawlee is a web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js, written in TypeScript and published on npm as the crawlee package. It lives in the JavaScript and TypeScript ecosystem, and it covers crawling and scraping end to end: fetching pages, following links, extracting data, and storing the results to disk or to the cloud. The project also has a Python counterpart, Crawlee for Python, maintained alongside it by Apify.
read the full crawlee overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is firecrawl or crawlee more popular?
firecrawl has 181,744 GitHub stars and crawlee has 25,828. 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 (181,744 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.