head to head · open source
stagehand vs crw
stagehand has 24,565 GitHub stars, 1,698 forks, 376 open issues and last shipped today. crw has 1,054 stars, 84 forks, 10 open issues and last shipped yesterday. stagehand leads on adoption by 2,231% (24,565 vs 1,054 stars). stagehand is written in TypeScript under MIT; crw is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0. stagehand has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, crw 8%. stagehand was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (ai, ai-agents, data-extraction), 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
| stagehand | crw | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 25K | ★ 1.1K |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 84 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick stagehand if
- You weight community size — 25K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick crw if
- You want the crw feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and crw fits your workflow better
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 →
About crw
crw (fastCRW) is a Rust based web scraping, crawling, and search engine with an MCP server that turns URLs into clean markdown or structured JSON, aimed at AI agents and the developers who wire them into coding tools.
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Frequently asked questions
Is stagehand or crw more popular?
stagehand has 24,565 GitHub stars and crw has 1,054. stagehand has the larger community by that measure.
Are stagehand and crw free?
Both are open source. stagehand is licensed under MIT and crw under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between stagehand and crw?
stagehand is written in TypeScript and crw in Rust. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, stagehand or crw?
Choose stagehand if you want the larger community (24,565 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose crw if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.