head to head · open source
katana vs icrawler
katana has 17,531 GitHub stars, 1,185 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. icrawler has 933 stars, 181 forks, 31 open issues and last shipped 9 months ago. katana leads on adoption by 1,779% (17,531 vs 933 stars). katana is written in Go under MIT; icrawler is written in Python under MIT. katana has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, icrawler 19%. 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 | icrawler | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 18K | ★ 933 |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-14 | 2025-12-10 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.2K | ⑂ 181 |
| 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 icrawler if
- You want the icrawler feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and icrawler 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 icrawler
icrawler is an MIT licensed Python framework for building multi thread crawlers, shipping ready made crawlers for Google, Bing and Baidu image search plus Flickr, and is aimed at developers who need to harvest image or media datasets without writing their own threading, retry and queueing code.
read the full icrawler overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is katana or icrawler more popular?
katana has 17,531 GitHub stars and icrawler has 933. katana has the larger community by that measure.
Are katana and icrawler free?
Both are open source. katana is licensed under MIT and icrawler under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between katana and icrawler?
katana is written in Go and icrawler in Python. 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 icrawler?
Choose katana if you want the larger community (17,531 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose icrawler if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.