head to head · open source
playwright vs crawlee
playwright has 96,380 GitHub stars, 6,469 forks, 185 open issues and last shipped today. crawlee has 25,841 stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. playwright leads on adoption by 273% (96,380 vs 25,841 stars). playwright is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. playwright has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, crawlee 6%. playwright was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (automation, javascript, 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
| playwright | crawlee | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 96K | ★ 26K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.5K | ⑂ 1.7K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick playwright if
- You weight community size — 96K 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 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 playwright
Playwright is an open source, Apache 2.0 licensed TypeScript framework for web testing and browser automation that drives Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit through a single API, built for end to end testers, browser automation script writers, and AI coding agents.
read the full playwright 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 playwright or crawlee more popular?
playwright has 96,380 GitHub stars and crawlee has 25,841. playwright has the larger community by that measure.
Are playwright and crawlee free?
Both are open source. playwright is licensed under Apache-2.0 and crawlee under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between playwright and crawlee?
playwright 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, playwright or crawlee?
Choose playwright if you want the larger community (96,380 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose crawlee if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.