head to head · open source
katana vs SeleniumBase
katana has 17,518 GitHub stars, 1,183 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. SeleniumBase has 13,023 stars, 1,583 forks, 14 open issues and last shipped yesterday. katana leads on adoption by 35% (17,518 vs 13,023 stars). katana is written in Go under MIT; SeleniumBase is written in Python under MIT. katana has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, SeleniumBase 12%. SeleniumBase was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | SeleniumBase | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 18K | ★ 13K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-14 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.2K | ⑂ 1.6K |
| 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 SeleniumBase if
- You want the SeleniumBase feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and SeleniumBase 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 SeleniumBase
SeleniumBase is an MIT licensed Python framework that combines browser automation, end to end testing, web crawling, scraping, and bot detection bypass in one package, built for QA engineers, test automation developers, and Python scraper authors.
read the full SeleniumBase overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is katana or SeleniumBase more popular?
katana has 17,518 GitHub stars and SeleniumBase has 13,023. katana has the larger community by that measure.
Are katana and SeleniumBase free?
Both are open source. katana is licensed under MIT and SeleniumBase under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between katana and SeleniumBase?
katana is written in Go and SeleniumBase 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 SeleniumBase?
Choose katana if you want the larger community (17,518 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose SeleniumBase if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.