head to head · open source
lux vs crawlab
lux has 31,821 GitHub stars, 3,331 forks, 545 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. crawlab has 12,290 stars, 1,884 forks, 166 open issues and last shipped 9 months ago. lux leads on adoption by 159% (31,821 vs 12,290 stars). lux is written in Go under MIT; crawlab is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause. lux has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, crawlab 15%. lux was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (crawler, go), 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 | crawlab | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 12K |
| License | MIT | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-03-29 | 2026-02-10 |
| 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 crawlab if
- You want the crawlab feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and crawlab 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 crawlab
Crawlab 中文 English Installation Run Screenshot Architecture Integration Compare Community & Sponsorship CHANGELOG Disclaimer Golang based distributed web crawler management platform, supporting various languages including Python, NodeJS, Go, Java, PHP and various web crawler frameworks including Scrapy, Puppeteer, Selenium. Demo Documentation Installation You can follow the installation guide. Quick Start Please open the command line prompt and execute the command below. Make sure you have installed docker compose in advance. Next, you can look into the docker compose.yml (with detailed config params) and the…
read the full crawlab overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lux or crawlab more popular?
lux has 31,821 GitHub stars and crawlab has 12,290. lux has the larger community by that measure.
Are lux and crawlab free?
Both are open source. lux is licensed under MIT and crawlab under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lux and crawlab?
lux is written in Go and crawlab 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 crawlab?
Choose lux if you want the larger community (31,821 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose crawlab if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.