head to head · open source
firecrawl vs Hey
firecrawl has 197,942 GitHub stars, 10,457 forks, 621 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Hey has 29,353 stars, 1,808 forks, 7 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. firecrawl leads on adoption by 574% (197,942 vs 29,353 stars). firecrawl is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; Hey is written in TypeScript under GPL-3.0. firecrawl has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, Hey 6%. firecrawl 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
| firecrawl | Hey | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 198K | ★ 29K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-09-06 |
| Forks | ⑂ 10K | ⑂ 1.8K |
| 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 Hey if
- You want the Hey feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and Hey 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 Hey
Hey.xyz Hey is a decentralized and permissionless social media application built with Lens Protocol. Open Source Snapshot Notice This repository represents the last publicly available open source version of Hey.xyz before May 15, 2026 . Development and changes made to Hey.xyz after May 15, 2026 are currently not open source and are not included in this repository. This repository is therefore preserved as a historical open source snapshot of the Hey.xyz codebase as it existed before that date. About Hey is a decentralized social network built on top of the Lens Protocol. The application provides a social…
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Frequently asked questions
Is firecrawl or Hey more popular?
firecrawl has 197,942 GitHub stars and Hey has 29,353. firecrawl has the larger community by that measure.
Are firecrawl and Hey free?
Both are open source. firecrawl is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Hey under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between firecrawl and Hey?
firecrawl is written in TypeScript and Hey 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 Hey?
Choose firecrawl if you want the larger community (197,942 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose Hey if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.