head to head · open source
katana vs crawlab
katana has 17,518 GitHub stars, 1,183 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. crawlab has 12,273 stars, 1,890 forks, 166 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. katana leads on adoption by 43% (17,518 vs 12,273 stars). katana is written in Go under MIT; crawlab is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause. katana has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, crawlab 15%. katana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (crawler), 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
| katana | crawlab | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 18K | ★ 12K |
| License | MIT | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-14 | 2026-02-10 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.2K | ⑂ 1.9K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick katana if
- You weight community size — 18K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick crawlab if
- You want the crawlab feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and crawlab fits your workflow better
About katana
Katana is an open source, MIT licensed crawling and spidering framework written in Go, built for security engineers and automation pipelines that need to map web applications at scale rather than explore them by hand.
read the full katana overview →
About crawlab
Crawlab is a BSD 3 Clause licensed, Go based distributed web crawler admin platform that manages spiders regardless of the language or framework they are written in, built for teams that run many crawlers and need one place to schedule, monitor, and inspect them.
read the full crawlab overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is katana or crawlab more popular?
katana has 17,518 GitHub stars and crawlab has 12,273. katana has the larger community by that measure.
Are katana and crawlab free?
Both are open source. katana is licensed under MIT and crawlab under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between katana and crawlab?
katana is written in Go and crawlab in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, katana or crawlab?
Choose katana if you want the larger community (17,518 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose crawlab if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.