head to head · open source
katana vs crawlab
katana has 17,786 GitHub stars, 1,213 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped yesterday. crawlab has 12,290 stars, 1,884 forks, 166 open issues and last shipped 9 months ago. katana leads on adoption by 45% (17,786 vs 12,290 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 | 2026-11-02 | 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
A next generation crawling and spidering framework Features • Installation • Usage • Scope • Config • Filters • Join Discord Features Fast And fully configurable web crawling Standard and Headless mode JavaScript parsing / crawling Customizable automatic form filling Scope control Preconfigured field / Regex Knowledge base ML page type / form classification (auto downloaded model) Customizable output Preconfigured fields INPUT STDIN , URL and LIST OUTPUT STDOUT , FILE and JSON Installation katana requires Go 1.26+ to install successfully. If you encounter any installation issues, we recommend trying with the…
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About crawlab
Crawlab 中文 English Installation Run Screenshot Architecture Integration Compare Community & Sponsorship CHANGELOG Disclaimer Golang based distributed web crawler management platform, supporting various languages including Python, NodeJS, Go, Java, PHP and various web crawler frameworks including Scrapy, Puppeteer, Selenium. Demo Documentation Installation You can follow the installation guide. Quick Start Please open the command line prompt and execute the command below. Make sure you have installed docker compose in advance. Next, you can look into the docker compose.yml (with detailed config params) and the…
read the full crawlab overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is katana or crawlab more popular?
katana has 17,786 GitHub stars and crawlab has 12,290. 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 (17,786 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose crawlab if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.