head to head · open source
colly vs stagehand
colly has 25,520 GitHub stars, 1,862 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. stagehand has 24,322 stars, 1,685 forks, 376 open issues and last shipped yesterday. colly leads on adoption by 5% (25,520 vs 24,322 stars). colly is written in Go under Apache-2.0; stagehand is written in TypeScript under MIT. colly has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, stagehand 7%. stagehand was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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
| colly | stagehand | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 24K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 1.7K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick colly if
- You weight community size — 26K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick stagehand if
- You want the stagehand feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and stagehand fits your workflow better
About colly
Colly is an open source scraping and crawling framework written in Go, distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. It lives in the Go ecosystem and is consumed as a library rather than a standalone application: the README describes it as providing a clean interface for writing any kind of crawler, scraper, or spider, and the project's own topics list it as a crawler, crawling framework, scraper, scraping tool, and spider. The repository has been public for roughly nine years, carries 25,516 stars and 1,862 forks, and its most recent push was on 2 September 2026. Documentation and examples are hosted at go colly.org…
read the full colly overview →
About stagehand
Stagehand is the MIT licensed SDK for extracting data and interacting with any site on the web, available in TypeScript, Python, and Go, and aimed at developers building AI agents that need to drive a browser the way a person does rather than at engineers writing test suites.
read the full stagehand overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is colly or stagehand more popular?
colly has 25,520 GitHub stars and stagehand has 24,322. colly has the larger community by that measure.
Are colly and stagehand free?
Both are open source. colly is licensed under Apache-2.0 and stagehand under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between colly and stagehand?
colly is written in Go and stagehand 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, colly or stagehand?
Choose colly if you want the larger community (25,520 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose stagehand if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.