head to head · open source
crawlee vs proxy_pool
crawlee has 25,823 GitHub stars, 1,673 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. proxy_pool has 23,707 stars, 5,418 forks, 298 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. crawlee leads on adoption by 9% (25,823 vs 23,707 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; proxy_pool is written in Python under MIT. crawlee has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, proxy_pool 23%. crawlee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (crawler), 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 | proxy_pool | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 24K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-06-15 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 5.4K |
| 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 proxy_pool if
- You want the proxy_pool feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and proxy_pool 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 proxy_pool
proxy pool is a self hosted Python proxy IP pool for web spiders that continuously collects, checks, and serves rotating HTTP proxies from public free proxy sources through a Redis backed pool.
read the full proxy_pool overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or proxy_pool more popular?
crawlee has 25,823 GitHub stars and proxy_pool has 23,707. crawlee has the larger community by that measure.
Are crawlee and proxy_pool free?
Both are open source. crawlee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and proxy_pool under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between crawlee and proxy_pool?
crawlee is written in TypeScript and proxy_pool in Python. 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 proxy_pool?
Choose crawlee if you want the larger community (25,823 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose proxy_pool if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.