head to head · open source
lux vs icrawler
lux has 31,694 GitHub stars, 3,313 forks, 545 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. icrawler has 933 stars, 181 forks, 31 open issues and last shipped 9 months ago. lux leads on adoption by 3,297% (31,694 vs 933 stars). lux is written in Go under MIT; icrawler is written in Python under MIT. lux has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, icrawler 19%. lux 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 | icrawler | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 933 |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-03-29 | 2025-12-10 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.3K | ⑂ 181 |
| 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 icrawler if
- You want the icrawler feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and icrawler 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 icrawler
icrawler is an MIT licensed Python framework for building multi thread crawlers, shipping ready made crawlers for Google, Bing and Baidu image search plus Flickr, and is aimed at developers who need to harvest image or media datasets without writing their own threading, retry and queueing code.
read the full icrawler overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lux or icrawler more popular?
lux has 31,694 GitHub stars and icrawler has 933. lux has the larger community by that measure.
Are lux and icrawler free?
Both are open source. lux is licensed under MIT and icrawler under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lux and icrawler?
lux is written in Go and icrawler 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 icrawler?
Choose lux if you want the larger community (31,694 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose icrawler if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.