head to head · open source
lux vs ruia
lux has 31,700 GitHub stars, 3,315 forks, 545 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. ruia has 1,737 stars, 185 forks, 9 open issues and last shipped 10 days ago. lux leads on adoption by 1,725% (31,700 vs 1,737 stars). lux is written in Go under MIT; ruia is written in Python under Apache-2.0. lux has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, ruia 11%. ruia 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 | ruia | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 1.7K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-03-29 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.3K | ⑂ 185 |
| 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 ruia if
- You want the ruia feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and ruia 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 ruia
Ruia is an asynchronous web scraping micro framework for Python 3.6 and above, built on asyncio and aiohttp , and intended for Python developers who want to declare what a crawler should collect and let the framework handle concurrent requests.
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Frequently asked questions
Is lux or ruia more popular?
lux has 31,700 GitHub stars and ruia has 1,737. lux has the larger community by that measure.
Are lux and ruia free?
Both are open source. lux is licensed under MIT and ruia under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lux and ruia?
lux is written in Go and ruia 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 ruia?
Choose lux if you want the larger community (31,700 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose ruia if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.