head to head · open source
lux vs crw
lux has 31,686 GitHub stars, 3,312 forks, 545 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. crw has 1,045 stars, 80 forks, 10 open issues and last shipped yesterday. lux leads on adoption by 2,932% (31,686 vs 1,045 stars). lux is written in Go under MIT; crw is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0. lux has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, crw 8%. crw was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (crawler), 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 | crw | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 1.0K |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-03-29 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.3K | ⑂ 80 |
| 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 crw if
- You want the crw feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and crw 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 crw
crw (fastCRW) is a Rust based web scraping, crawling, and search engine with an MCP server that turns URLs into clean markdown or structured JSON, aimed at AI agents and the developers who wire them into coding tools.
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Frequently asked questions
Is lux or crw more popular?
lux has 31,686 GitHub stars and crw has 1,045. lux has the larger community by that measure.
Are lux and crw free?
Both are open source. lux is licensed under MIT and crw under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lux and crw?
lux is written in Go and crw in Rust. 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 crw?
Choose lux if you want the larger community (31,686 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose crw if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.