head to head · open source
lux vs gain
lux has 31,821 GitHub stars, 3,331 forks, 545 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. gain has 2,017 stars, 202 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. lux leads on adoption by 1,478% (31,821 vs 2,017 stars). lux is written in Go under MIT; gain is written in Python under MIT. lux has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, gain 10%. gain 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 | gain | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 2.0K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-03-29 | 2026-08-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.3K | ⑂ 202 |
| 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 gain if
- You want the gain feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and gain 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 gain
gain Async web crawling framework for everyone. Built on asyncio , aiohttp , and lxml / pyquery . Declare items and parsers; gain handles the concurrency, retries, and persistence. Install Linux users can opt into uvloop for an extra speed bump: Requires Python 3.10+. Quickstart Run it: XPath parsers How it works 1. Spider kicks off from start url under a concurrency budget. 2. Parsers either follow (one argument) — discovering more URLs to queue — or extract (two arguments) — instantiating an Item from each matching page. 3. Items use Css / Xpath / Regex selectors to pull fields out of HTML. 4. save() is your…
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Frequently asked questions
Is lux or gain more popular?
lux has 31,821 GitHub stars and gain has 2,017. lux has the larger community by that measure.
Are lux and gain free?
Both are open source. lux is licensed under MIT and gain under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lux and gain?
lux is written in Go and gain in Python. 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 gain?
Choose lux if you want the larger community (31,821 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose gain if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.