head to head · open source
lux vs spider
lux has 31,821 GitHub stars, 3,331 forks, 545 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. spider has 2,820 stars, 322 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. lux leads on adoption by 1,028% (31,821 vs 2,820 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 | ★ 2.8K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-03-29 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.3K | ⑂ 322 |
| 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 Let there be Lux! 👾 Lux is a fast and simple video downloader built with Go. Installation Prerequisites Install via go install Homebrew (macOS only) Arch Linux Void Linux Scoop on Windows Chocolatey on Windows Cask on Windows/macOS/Linux Getting Started Download a video Download anything else Download playlist Multiple inputs Resume a download Auto retry Cookies Proxy Multi Thread Short link bilibili Use specified Referrer Specify the output path and name Debug Mode Reuse extracted data Options Download: Network: Playlist: Filesystem: Subtitle: Youku: aria2: Supported Sites Known issues 优酷 西瓜/头条视频…
About spider
Spider The fastest web crawler and scraper for Rust. spider.cloud · Guides · Docs · Examples · Discord Spider is a concurrency first crawling engine written in Rust. It streams pages as they arrive, renders JavaScript only on pages that need it, and scales from a single script to a distributed fleet without changing your code. The same engine runs Spider Cloud, so you can prototype locally and move to managed infrastructure with one config change. Start in the cloud The hardest part of crawling at scale isn't the code. It's the proxies, headless browsers, and constant anti bot churn. Spider Cloud runs all of…
read the full spider overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lux or spider more popular?
lux has 31,821 GitHub stars and spider has 2,820. 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 (31,821 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose spider if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.