head to head · open source
lux vs spider
lux has 31,694 GitHub stars, 3,313 forks, 545 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. spider has 2,724 stars, 302 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. lux leads on adoption by 1,064% (31,694 vs 2,724 stars). lux is written in Go under MIT; spider is written in Rust under MIT. lux has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, spider 11%. spider 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 | spider | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 2.7K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-03-29 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.3K | ⑂ 302 |
| 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 spider if
- You want the spider feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and spider 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 spider
Spider is a concurrency first web crawling and scraping engine written in Rust, licensed under MIT, and aimed at developers and data teams that need to collect web data with low latency, from a single script up to a distributed fleet.
read the full spider overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lux or spider more popular?
lux has 31,694 GitHub stars and spider has 2,724. lux has the larger community by that measure.
Are lux and spider free?
Both are open source. lux is licensed under MIT and spider under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lux and spider?
lux is written in Go and spider in Rust. 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 spider?
Choose lux if you want the larger community (31,694 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose spider if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.