head to head · open source
katana vs xxl-crawler
katana has 17,531 GitHub stars, 1,185 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. xxl-crawler has 758 stars, 318 forks, 7 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. katana leads on adoption by 2,213% (17,531 vs 758 stars). katana is written in Go under MIT; xxl-crawler is written in Java under Apache-2.0. katana has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, xxl-crawler 42%. 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 | xxl-crawler | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 18K | ★ 758 |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-09-14 | 2026-08-08 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.2K | ⑂ 318 |
| 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 xxl-crawler if
- You want the xxl-crawler feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and xxl-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 xxl-crawler
XXL CRAWLER is a lightweight, open source Java web crawler framework that lets a developer start a multi threaded crawler with a single line of code and map collected page data into Java objects through annotations, built for Java teams that need to gather web data without adopting a heavyweight scraping platform.
read the full xxl-crawler overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is katana or xxl-crawler more popular?
katana has 17,531 GitHub stars and xxl-crawler has 758. katana has the larger community by that measure.
Are katana and xxl-crawler free?
Both are open source. katana is licensed under MIT and xxl-crawler under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between katana and xxl-crawler?
katana is written in Go and xxl-crawler in Java. 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 xxl-crawler?
Choose katana if you want the larger community (17,531 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose xxl-crawler if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.