head to head · open source
lux vs pydoll
lux has 31,694 GitHub stars, 3,313 forks, 545 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. pydoll has 7,090 stars, 406 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. lux leads on adoption by 347% (31,694 vs 7,090 stars). lux is written in Go under MIT; pydoll is written in HTML under MIT. lux has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, pydoll 6%. pydoll 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 | pydoll | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 7.1K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | HTML |
| Last push | 2026-03-29 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.3K | ⑂ 406 |
| 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 pydoll if
- You want the pydoll feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches HTML
- You evaluated both and pydoll 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 pydoll
Pydoll is a stealth first Python library that automates Chromium based browsers directly over the DevTools Protocol, without a WebDriver, for developers who scrape, test, or automate sites that block ordinary bots.
read the full pydoll overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lux or pydoll more popular?
lux has 31,694 GitHub stars and pydoll has 7,090. lux has the larger community by that measure.
Are lux and pydoll free?
Both are open source. lux is licensed under MIT and pydoll under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lux and pydoll?
lux is written in Go and pydoll in HTML. 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 pydoll?
Choose lux if you want the larger community (31,694 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose pydoll if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.