head to head · open source
lux vs Maxun
lux has 31,687 GitHub stars, 3,313 forks, 545 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. Maxun has 17,490 stars, 1,509 forks, 105 open issues and last shipped yesterday. lux leads on adoption by 81% (31,687 vs 17,490 stars). lux is written in Go under MIT; Maxun is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0. lux has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, Maxun 9%. Maxun 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 | Maxun | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 17K |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-03-29 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.3K | ⑂ 1.5K |
| 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 Maxun if
- You want the Maxun feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and Maxun 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 Maxun
Maxun is an open source no code web data platform for real time web scraping, crawling, search, and AI data extraction. It turns websites into structured data and presents robots that collect information without code. The TypeScript project is released under AGPL 3.0, with topics placing it in browser automation, Playwright, crawler, data extraction, and robotic process automation.
read the full Maxun overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lux or Maxun more popular?
lux has 31,687 GitHub stars and Maxun has 17,490. lux has the larger community by that measure.
Are lux and Maxun free?
Both are open source. lux is licensed under MIT and Maxun under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lux and Maxun?
lux is written in Go and Maxun 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 Maxun?
Choose lux if you want the larger community (31,687 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Maxun if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.