head to head · open source
Maxun vs crawlab
Maxun has 18,134 GitHub stars, 1,564 forks, 105 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. crawlab has 12,290 stars, 1,884 forks, 166 open issues and last shipped 9 months ago. Maxun leads on adoption by 48% (18,134 vs 12,290 stars). Maxun is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; crawlab is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause. Maxun has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, crawlab 15%. Maxun 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
| Maxun | crawlab | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 18K | ★ 12K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-28 | 2026-02-10 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.6K | ⑂ 1.9K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Maxun if
- You weight community size — 18K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick crawlab if
- You want the crawlab feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and crawlab fits your workflow better
About Maxun
Maxun Turn Any Website Into A Structured API ✨ The unified open source no code platform for real time web scraping, crawling, search and AI data extraction ✨ Go To App • Documentation • Website • Discord • Watch Tutorials Sponsors Webshare Webshare gives you instant access to a proxy pool of 80M+ ethically sourced IPs across 195+ countries, with rotating residential, static ISP, and datacenter options plus a full API. It includes a 100+ Gbps backbone, country/city/state/ZIP/ASN level targeting, and requires no credit card to start. Free tier: 10 proxies + 1GB/month · Discount: MAXUN20 Get 20% off your first…
read the full Maxun overview →
About crawlab
Crawlab 中文 English Installation Run Screenshot Architecture Integration Compare Community & Sponsorship CHANGELOG Disclaimer Golang based distributed web crawler management platform, supporting various languages including Python, NodeJS, Go, Java, PHP and various web crawler frameworks including Scrapy, Puppeteer, Selenium. Demo Documentation Installation You can follow the installation guide. Quick Start Please open the command line prompt and execute the command below. Make sure you have installed docker compose in advance. Next, you can look into the docker compose.yml (with detailed config params) and the…
read the full crawlab overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Maxun or crawlab more popular?
Maxun has 18,134 GitHub stars and crawlab has 12,290. Maxun has the larger community by that measure.
Are Maxun and crawlab free?
Both are open source. Maxun is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and crawlab under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Maxun and crawlab?
Maxun is written in TypeScript and crawlab in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Maxun or crawlab?
Choose Maxun if you want the larger community (18,134 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose crawlab if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.