head to head · open source
crawlee vs patchright
crawlee has 25,841 GitHub stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. patchright has 4,636 stars, 227 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 7 days ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 457% (25,841 vs 4,636 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; patchright is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. crawlee has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, patchright 5%. crawlee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (automation, 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 | patchright | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 4.6K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-13 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 227 |
| 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 patchright if
- You want the patchright 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 patchright 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 patchright
Patchright is a patched, undetected version of the Playwright testing and automation framework, shipped as a driver and aimed at developers who need browser automation that anti bot systems do not flag.
read the full patchright overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or patchright more popular?
crawlee has 25,841 GitHub stars and patchright has 4,636. crawlee has the larger community by that measure.
Are crawlee and patchright free?
Both are open source. crawlee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and patchright under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between crawlee and patchright?
crawlee is written in TypeScript and patchright 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 patchright?
Choose crawlee if you want the larger community (25,841 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose patchright if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.