head to head · open source
katana vs node-crawler
katana has 17,531 GitHub stars, 1,185 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. node-crawler has 6,793 stars, 864 forks, 29 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. katana leads on adoption by 158% (17,531 vs 6,793 stars). katana is written in Go under MIT; node-crawler is written in TypeScript under MIT. katana has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, node-crawler 13%. 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 | node-crawler | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 18K | ★ 6.8K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-14 | 2026-06-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.2K | ⑂ 864 |
| 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 node-crawler if
- You want the node-crawler feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and node-crawler 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 node-crawler
node crawler is a web crawler and spider library for Node.js that pairs a request queue with a server side DOM. It lives in the Node.js ecosystem and is published to npm under the package name crawler . The project is written in TypeScript and released under the MIT license, with 6,792 stars, 864 forks, and 29 open issues at the time of writing. The repository has been in development for 16 years and was last pushed on 18 June 2026. Version 2 is described as the advanced and TypeScript version of the original node crawler, and the topic list — cheerio, crawler, extract data, javascript, jquery, nodejs, spider — r…
read the full node-crawler overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is katana or node-crawler more popular?
katana has 17,531 GitHub stars and node-crawler has 6,793. katana has the larger community by that measure.
Are katana and node-crawler free?
Both are open source. katana is licensed under MIT and node-crawler under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between katana and node-crawler?
katana is written in Go and node-crawler 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, katana or node-crawler?
Choose katana if you want the larger community (17,531 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose node-crawler if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.