head to head · open source
katana vs rod
katana has 17,531 GitHub stars, 1,185 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. rod has 7,107 stars, 485 forks, 212 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. katana leads on adoption by 147% (17,531 vs 7,107 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 | 2026-09-14 | 2026-08-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.2K | ⑂ 485 |
| 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
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 rod
Rod is a high level driver for the Chrome DevTools Protocol, written in Go and released under the MIT license. It lives in the Go ecosystem and is published as the module github.com/go rod/rod , with documentation hosted at go rod.github.io and an API reference on pkg.go.dev. The project is designed for web automation and scraping, and it deliberately spans two levels of use: senior developers can work with the low level packages and functions to customize the driver or build their own version of it, while the high level functions serve as examples that produce a default, ready to use build.
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Frequently asked questions
Is katana or rod more popular?
katana has 17,531 GitHub stars and rod has 7,107. 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 (17,531 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose rod if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.