head to head · open source
Maxun vs crawlab
Maxun has 17,485 GitHub stars, 1,509 forks, 105 open issues and last shipped yesterday. crawlab has 12,273 stars, 1,890 forks, 166 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. Maxun leads on adoption by 42% (17,485 vs 12,273 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 | ★ 17K | ★ 12K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-02-10 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.5K | ⑂ 1.9K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Maxun if
- You weight community size — 17K 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 is an open source no code web data platform for real time web scraping, crawling, search, and AI data extraction. It turns websites into structured data and presents robots that collect information without code. The TypeScript project is released under AGPL 3.0, with topics placing it in browser automation, Playwright, crawler, data extraction, and robotic process automation.
read the full Maxun overview →
About crawlab
Crawlab is a BSD 3 Clause licensed, Go based distributed web crawler admin platform that manages spiders regardless of the language or framework they are written in, built for teams that run many crawlers and need one place to schedule, monitor, and inspect them.
read the full crawlab overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Maxun or crawlab more popular?
Maxun has 17,485 GitHub stars and crawlab has 12,273. 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 (17,485 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.