head to head · open source
page-agent vs crawlee
page-agent has 29,140 GitHub stars, 2,616 forks, 94 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. crawlee has 25,858 stars, 1,677 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. page-agent leads on adoption by 13% (29,140 vs 25,858 stars). page-agent is written in TypeScript under MIT; crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. page-agent has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, crawlee 6%. page-agent was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (javascript), 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
| page-agent | crawlee | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 29K | ★ 26K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.6K | ⑂ 1.7K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick page-agent if
- You weight community size — 29K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick crawlee if
- You want the crawlee feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and crawlee fits your workflow better
About page-agent
Page Agent is an MIT licensed TypeScript library from Alibaba that embeds a natural language GUI agent directly inside a web page, aimed at product teams, accessibility engineers, and automation developers who want to drive their own interfaces with plain language instructions instead of hand written scripts.
read the full page-agent overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is page-agent or crawlee more popular?
page-agent has 29,140 GitHub stars and crawlee has 25,858. page-agent has the larger community by that measure.
Are page-agent and crawlee free?
Both are open source. page-agent is licensed under MIT and crawlee under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between page-agent and crawlee?
page-agent is written in TypeScript and crawlee 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, page-agent or crawlee?
Choose page-agent if you want the larger community (29,140 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose crawlee if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.