head to head · open source
katana vs crawly
katana has 17,823 GitHub stars, 1,221 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. crawly has 1,129 stars, 125 forks, 8 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. katana leads on adoption by 1,479% (17,823 vs 1,129 stars). katana is written in Go under MIT; crawly is written in Elixir under Apache-2.0. katana has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, crawly 11%. 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 | crawly | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 18K | ★ 1.1K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Elixir |
| Last push | 2026-11-09 | 2026-11-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.2K | ⑂ 125 |
| 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 crawly if
- You want the crawly feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Elixir
- You evaluated both and crawly 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…
read the full katana overview →
About crawly
Crawly Overview Crawly is an application framework for crawling web sites and extracting structured data which can be used for a wide range of useful applications, like data mining, information processing or historical archival. Requirements 1. Elixir 1.14 2. Works on GNU/Linux, Windows, macOS X, and BSD. Quickstart 0. Create a new project: mix new quickstart sup 1. Add Crawly as a dependencies: 2. Fetch dependencies: $ mix deps.get 3. Create a spider New in 0.15.0 : It's possible to use the command to speed up the spider creation, so you will have a generated file with all needed callbacks: mix…
read the full crawly overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is katana or crawly more popular?
katana has 17,823 GitHub stars and crawly has 1,129. katana has the larger community by that measure.
Are katana and crawly free?
Both are open source. katana is licensed under MIT and crawly under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between katana and crawly?
katana is written in Go and crawly in Elixir. 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 crawly?
Choose katana if you want the larger community (17,823 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose crawly if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.