head to head · open source
lux vs colly
lux has 31,818 GitHub stars, 3,329 forks, 545 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. colly has 25,572 stars, 1,859 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 18 days ago. lux leads on adoption by 24% (31,818 vs 25,572 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 | 2026-10-16 |
| 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 Let there be Lux! 👾 Lux is a fast and simple video downloader built with Go. Installation Prerequisites Install via go install Homebrew (macOS only) Arch Linux Void Linux Scoop on Windows Chocolatey on Windows Cask on Windows/macOS/Linux Getting Started Download a video Download anything else Download playlist Multiple inputs Resume a download Auto retry Cookies Proxy Multi Thread Short link bilibili Use specified Referrer Specify the output path and name Debug Mode Reuse extracted data Options Download: Network: Playlist: Filesystem: Subtitle: Youku: aria2: Supported Sites Known issues 优酷 西瓜/头条视频…
About colly
Colly Lightning Fast and Elegant Scraping Framework for Gophers Colly provides a clean interface to write any kind of crawler/scraper/spider. With Colly you can easily extract structured data from websites, which can be used for a wide range of applications, like data mining, data processing or archiving. Sponsors NodeMaven: The most efficient proxy provider for Web Scrapping and Automation with the Highest Quality IP on the market. Why NodeMaven? 99.9% uptime ZIP Targeting IP filtering: all proxies have fraud score 1k request/sec on a single core) Manages request delays and maximum concurrency per domain…
read the full colly overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lux or colly more popular?
lux has 31,818 GitHub stars and colly has 25,572. 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 (31,818 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose colly if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.