head to head · open source
lux vs colly
lux has 31,686 GitHub stars, 3,312 forks, 545 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. colly has 25,520 stars, 1,862 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. lux leads on adoption by 24% (31,686 vs 25,520 stars). lux is written in Go under MIT; colly is written in Go under Apache-2.0. lux has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, colly 7%. colly was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 4 topic tags (crawler, go, golang, scraper), 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
| lux | colly | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 26K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-03-29 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.3K | ⑂ 1.9K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick lux if
- You weight community size — 32K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick colly if
- You want the colly feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and colly fits your workflow better
About lux
Lux is a video download library and command line tool written in Go, released under the MIT license. It ships as a single lux binary that takes one or more URLs and retrieves the underlying media streams, and it also exposes the downloading logic as a Go library that other programs can embed. The project has existed for roughly nine years and lives in the Go ecosystem, distributed through go install alongside the usual operating system package managers.
About colly
Colly is an open source scraping and crawling framework written in Go, distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. It lives in the Go ecosystem and is consumed as a library rather than a standalone application: the README describes it as providing a clean interface for writing any kind of crawler, scraper, or spider, and the project's own topics list it as a crawler, crawling framework, scraper, scraping tool, and spider. The repository has been public for roughly nine years, carries 25,516 stars and 1,862 forks, and its most recent push was on 2 September 2026. Documentation and examples are hosted at go colly.org…
read the full colly overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lux or colly more popular?
lux has 31,686 GitHub stars and colly has 25,520. lux has the larger community by that measure.
Are lux and colly free?
Both are open source. lux is licensed under MIT and colly under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lux and colly?
lux is written in Go and colly 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, lux or colly?
Choose lux if you want the larger community (31,686 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose colly if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.