head to head · open source
katana vs node-crawler
katana has 17,797 GitHub stars, 1,215 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped yesterday. node-crawler has 6,796 stars, 862 forks, 29 open issues and last shipped 5 months ago. katana leads on adoption by 162% (17,797 vs 6,796 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 | 2026-11-04 | 2026-06-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.2K | ⑂ 862 |
| 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
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 node-crawler
[![NPM download][download image]][download url] [![Package Quality][quality image]][quality url] [quality image]: [quality url]: [download image]: [download url]: Crawler v2 : Advanced and Typescript version of node crawler Features: Server side DOM & automatic jQuery insertion with Cheerio (default), Configurable pool size and retries, Control rate limit, Priority queue of requests, let crawler deal for you with charset detection and conversion, If you have prior experience with Crawler v1, for fast migration, please proceed to the section Differences and Breaking Changes. Use with AI agents This package ships…
read the full node-crawler overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is katana or node-crawler more popular?
katana has 17,797 GitHub stars and node-crawler has 6,796. 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 (17,797 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose node-crawler if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.