head to head · open source
lux vs crawlab
lux has 31,694 GitHub stars, 3,313 forks, 545 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. crawlab has 12,273 stars, 1,889 forks, 166 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. lux leads on adoption by 158% (31,694 vs 12,273 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
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 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 crawlab
Crawlab is a BSD 3 Clause licensed, Go based distributed web crawler admin platform that manages spiders regardless of the language or framework they are written in, built for teams that run many crawlers and need one place to schedule, monitor, and inspect them.
read the full crawlab overview →
More in Data & Analytics
Related comparisons
More Data Extraction & Web Scraping projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Data Extraction & Web Scraping field.
Frequently asked questions
Is lux or crawlab more popular?
lux has 31,694 GitHub stars and crawlab has 12,273. 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 (31,694 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose crawlab if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.