head to head · open source
crawlee vs Maxun
crawlee has 25,823 GitHub stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Maxun has 17,485 stars, 1,509 forks, 105 open issues and last shipped yesterday. crawlee leads on adoption by 48% (25,823 vs 17,485 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; Maxun is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0. crawlee has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, Maxun 9%. crawlee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 4 topic tags (automation, crawler, crawling, playwright), 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
| crawlee | Maxun | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 17K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 1.5K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick crawlee if
- You weight community size — 26K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Maxun if
- You want the Maxun feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and Maxun fits your workflow better
About crawlee
Crawlee is a web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js, written in TypeScript and published on npm as the crawlee package. It lives in the JavaScript and TypeScript ecosystem, and it covers crawling and scraping end to end: fetching pages, following links, extracting data, and storing the results to disk or to the cloud. The project also has a Python counterpart, Crawlee for Python, maintained alongside it by Apify.
read the full crawlee overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or Maxun more popular?
crawlee has 25,823 GitHub stars and Maxun has 17,485. crawlee has the larger community by that measure.
Are crawlee and Maxun free?
Both are open source. crawlee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Maxun under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between crawlee and Maxun?
crawlee is written in TypeScript and Maxun 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, crawlee or Maxun?
Choose crawlee if you want the larger community (25,823 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose Maxun if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.