head to head · open source
lux vs katana
lux has 31,686 GitHub stars, 3,312 forks, 545 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. katana has 17,518 stars, 1,183 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. lux leads on adoption by 81% (31,686 vs 17,518 stars). lux is written in Go under MIT; katana is written in Go under MIT. lux has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, katana 7%. katana 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| lux | katana | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 18K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-03-29 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.3K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| 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 katana if
- You want the katana feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and katana 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 katana
Katana is an open source, MIT licensed crawling and spidering framework written in Go, built for security engineers and automation pipelines that need to map web applications at scale rather than explore them by hand.
read the full katana 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 katana more popular?
lux has 31,686 GitHub stars and katana has 17,518. lux has the larger community by that measure.
Are lux and katana free?
Both are open source. lux is licensed under MIT and katana under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lux and katana?
lux is written in Go and katana 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 katana?
Choose lux if you want the larger community (31,686 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose katana if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.