head to head · open source
firecrawl vs novu
firecrawl has 197,942 GitHub stars, 10,457 forks, 621 open issues and last shipped yesterday. novu has 40,249 stars, 4,522 forks, 105 open issues and last shipped yesterday. firecrawl leads on adoption by 392% (197,942 vs 40,249 stars). firecrawl is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; novu is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence. firecrawl has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, novu 11%. 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 | novu | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 198K | ★ 40K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Custom / other |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 10K | ⑂ 4.5K |
| 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 novu if
- You want the novu feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and novu 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 novu
The open source communication infrastructure for agents and products One API and one unified conversation model to connect your products and your agents to every channel your users live on — Inbox, Email, SMS, Push, Chat, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, and more. Learn More » Report a bug · Docs · Website · Join our Discord · Changelog · Roadmap · X · Contact us Software is becoming more conversational, and user expectations are rising with it. People no longer want static, irrelevant notifications they glance at and forget, they want to engage, ask questions, and go deeper. Instead of a one way report dropped…
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Frequently asked questions
Is firecrawl or novu more popular?
firecrawl has 197,942 GitHub stars and novu has 40,249. firecrawl has the larger community by that measure.
Are firecrawl and novu free?
Both are open source. firecrawl is licensed under AGPL-3.0, and novu has no licence declared in this registry. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between firecrawl and novu?
firecrawl is written in TypeScript and novu 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 novu?
Choose firecrawl if you want the larger community (197,942 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose novu if its feature set, stack or Custom / other licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.