head to head · open source
lux vs crawlee
lux has 31,686 GitHub stars, 3,312 forks, 545 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. crawlee has 25,823 stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. lux leads on adoption by 23% (31,686 vs 25,823 stars). lux is written in Go under MIT; crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. lux has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, crawlee 6%. crawlee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (crawler, 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 | crawlee | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 26K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-03-29 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.3K | ⑂ 1.7K |
| 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 crawlee if
- You want the crawlee feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and crawlee 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 crawlee
Crawlee is a web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js, written in TypeScript and published on npm as the crawlee package. It lives in the JavaScript and TypeScript ecosystem, and it covers crawling and scraping end to end: fetching pages, following links, extracting data, and storing the results to disk or to the cloud. The project also has a Python counterpart, Crawlee for Python, maintained alongside it by Apify.
read the full crawlee overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lux or crawlee more popular?
lux has 31,686 GitHub stars and crawlee has 25,823. lux has the larger community by that measure.
Are lux and crawlee free?
Both are open source. lux is licensed under MIT and crawlee under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lux and crawlee?
lux is written in Go and crawlee in TypeScript. 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 crawlee?
Choose lux if you want the larger community (31,686 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose crawlee if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.