head to head · open source
lux vs x-crawl
lux has 31,694 GitHub stars, 3,313 forks, 545 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. x-crawl has 1,883 stars, 116 forks, 16 open issues and last shipped yesterday. lux leads on adoption by 1,583% (31,694 vs 1,883 stars). lux is written in Go under MIT; x-crawl is written in TypeScript under MIT. lux has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, x-crawl 6%. x-crawl 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 | x-crawl | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 1.9K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-03-29 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.3K | ⑂ 116 |
| 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 x-crawl if
- You want the x-crawl feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and x-crawl 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 x-crawl
x crawl is a flexible, MIT licensed Node.js and TypeScript crawler library that pairs a conventional scraping API with optional AI assistance through Ollama and OpenAI, built for developers who need to pull data from dynamic pages, static pages, interface responses, and files under one consistent interface.
read the full x-crawl overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lux or x-crawl more popular?
lux has 31,694 GitHub stars and x-crawl has 1,883. lux has the larger community by that measure.
Are lux and x-crawl free?
Both are open source. lux is licensed under MIT and x-crawl under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lux and x-crawl?
lux is written in Go and x-crawl 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 x-crawl?
Choose lux if you want the larger community (31,694 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose x-crawl if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.