head to head · open source
playwright vs crawlee
playwright has 99,226 GitHub stars, 6,789 forks, 185 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. crawlee has 26,327 stars, 1,742 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. playwright leads on adoption by 277% (99,226 vs 26,327 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 7%. crawlee 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 | ★ 99K | ★ 26K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-03 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.8K | ⑂ 1.7K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick playwright if
- You weight community size — 99K 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 Documentation API reference Playwright is a framework for web automation and testing. It drives Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit with a single API — in your tests, in your scripts, and as a tool for AI agents. Get Started Choose the path that fits your workflow: Playwright Test Playwright Test is a full featured test runner built for end to end testing. It runs tests across Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit with full browser isolation, auto waiting, and web first assertions. Install Or add manually: Write a test Run tests Tests run in parallel across all configured browsers, in headless mode by default…
read the full playwright overview →
About crawlee
A web scraping and browser automation library Crawlee covers your crawling and scraping end to end and helps you build reliable scrapers. Fast. Your crawlers will appear human like and fly under the radar of modern bot protections even with the default configuration. Crawlee gives you the tools to crawl the web for links, scrape data, and store it to disk or cloud while staying configurable to suit your project's needs. Crawlee is available as the crawlee NPM package. 👉 View full documentation, guides and examples on the Crawlee project website 👈 Do you prefer 🐍 Python instead of JavaScript? 👉 Checkout…
read the full crawlee overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is playwright or crawlee more popular?
playwright has 99,226 GitHub stars and crawlee has 26,327. 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 (99,226 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.