head to head · open source
lux vs xxl-crawler
lux has 31,694 GitHub stars, 3,313 forks, 545 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. xxl-crawler has 758 stars, 318 forks, 7 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. lux leads on adoption by 4,081% (31,694 vs 758 stars). lux is written in Go under MIT; xxl-crawler is written in Java under Apache-2.0. lux has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, xxl-crawler 42%. xxl-crawler 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 | xxl-crawler | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 758 |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Java |
| Last push | 2026-03-29 | 2026-08-08 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.3K | ⑂ 318 |
| 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 xxl-crawler if
- You want the xxl-crawler feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Java
- You evaluated both and xxl-crawler 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 xxl-crawler
XXL CRAWLER is a lightweight, open source Java web crawler framework that lets a developer start a multi threaded crawler with a single line of code and map collected page data into Java objects through annotations, built for Java teams that need to gather web data without adopting a heavyweight scraping platform.
read the full xxl-crawler overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is lux or xxl-crawler more popular?
lux has 31,694 GitHub stars and xxl-crawler has 758. lux has the larger community by that measure.
Are lux and xxl-crawler free?
Both are open source. lux is licensed under MIT and xxl-crawler under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between lux and xxl-crawler?
lux is written in Go and xxl-crawler in Java. 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 xxl-crawler?
Choose lux if you want the larger community (31,694 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose xxl-crawler if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.