head to head · open source
katana vs rod
katana has 17,797 GitHub stars, 1,215 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped yesterday. rod has 7,143 stars, 489 forks, 212 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. katana leads on adoption by 149% (17,797 vs 7,143 stars). katana is written in Go under MIT; rod is written in Go under MIT. katana has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, rod 7%. katana was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (headless), 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 | rod | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 18K | ★ 7.1K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-08-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.2K | ⑂ 489 |
| 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 rod if
- You want the rod feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and rod 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 rod
Overview [ ][discord room] Documentation API reference FAQ Rod is a high level driver directly based on DevTools Protocol. It's designed for web automation and scraping for both high level and low level use, senior developers can use the low level packages and functions to easily customize or build up their own version of Rod, the high level functions are just examples to build a default version of Rod. 中文 API 文档 Features Chained context design, intuitive to timeout or cancel the long running task Auto wait elements to be ready Debugging friendly, auto input tracing, remote monitoring headless browser Thread…
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Frequently asked questions
Is katana or rod more popular?
katana has 17,797 GitHub stars and rod has 7,143. katana has the larger community by that measure.
Are katana and rod free?
Both are open source. katana is licensed under MIT and rod under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between katana and rod?
katana is written in Go and rod 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 rod?
Choose katana if you want the larger community (17,797 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose rod if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.