head to head · open source
firecrawl vs playwright
firecrawl has 198,602 GitHub stars, 10,477 forks, 621 open issues and last shipped yesterday. playwright has 99,299 stars, 6,796 forks, 185 open issues and last shipped yesterday. firecrawl leads on adoption by 100% (198,602 vs 99,299 stars). firecrawl is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; playwright is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. firecrawl has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, playwright 7%. playwright 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 | playwright | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 199K | ★ 99K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 10K | ⑂ 6.8K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick firecrawl if
- You weight community size — 199K 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 playwright if
- You want the playwright 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 playwright 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 playwright
🎭 Playwright Documentation API reference Playwright is a framework for web automation and testing. It drives Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit with a single API — in your tests, in your scripts, and as a tool for AI agents. Get Started Choose the path that fits your workflow: Playwright Test Playwright Test is a full featured test runner built for end to end testing. It runs tests across Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit with full browser isolation, auto waiting, and web first assertions. Install Or add manually: Write a test Run tests Tests run in parallel across all configured browsers, in headless mode by default…
read the full playwright overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is firecrawl or playwright more popular?
firecrawl has 198,602 GitHub stars and playwright has 99,299. firecrawl has the larger community by that measure.
Are firecrawl and playwright free?
Both are open source. firecrawl is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and playwright under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between firecrawl and playwright?
firecrawl is written in TypeScript and playwright 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 playwright?
Choose firecrawl if you want the larger community (198,602 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose playwright if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.