head to head · open source
lux vs node-crawler
lux has 31,694 GitHub stars, 3,313 forks, 545 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. node-crawler has 6,793 stars, 864 forks, 29 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. lux leads on adoption by 367% (31,694 vs 6,793 stars). lux is written in Go under MIT; node-crawler is written in TypeScript under MIT. lux has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, node-crawler 13%. node-crawler 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 | node-crawler | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 6.8K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-03-29 | 2026-06-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.3K | ⑂ 864 |
| 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 node-crawler if
- You want the node-crawler feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and node-crawler 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 node-crawler
node crawler is a web crawler and spider library for Node.js that pairs a request queue with a server side DOM. It lives in the Node.js ecosystem and is published to npm under the package name crawler . The project is written in TypeScript and released under the MIT license, with 6,792 stars, 864 forks, and 29 open issues at the time of writing. The repository has been in development for 16 years and was last pushed on 18 June 2026. Version 2 is described as the advanced and TypeScript version of the original node crawler, and the topic list — cheerio, crawler, extract data, javascript, jquery, nodejs, spider — r…
read the full node-crawler overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lux or node-crawler more popular?
lux has 31,694 GitHub stars and node-crawler has 6,793. lux has the larger community by that measure.
Are lux and node-crawler free?
Both are open source. lux is licensed under MIT and node-crawler under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lux and node-crawler?
lux is written in Go and node-crawler 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 node-crawler?
Choose lux if you want the larger community (31,694 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose node-crawler if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.