head to head · open source
stagehand vs webclaw
stagehand has 25,934 GitHub stars, 1,808 forks, 376 open issues and last shipped yesterday. webclaw has 2,425 stars, 242 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. stagehand leads on adoption by 969% (25,934 vs 2,425 stars). stagehand is written in TypeScript under MIT; webclaw is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0. stagehand has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, webclaw 10%. stagehand was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (ai-agents), 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 | webclaw | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 2.4K |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.8K | ⑂ 242 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick stagehand if
- You weight community size — 26K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick webclaw if
- You want the webclaw 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 webclaw fits your workflow better
About stagehand
Stagehand is the SDK to extract data and interact with any site on the web. Playwright was built for testing. Stagehand is built for agents, in TypeScript, Python, and Go. Docs · Quickstart · ⭐ Star this repo AI that uses the browser like humans. Sign in once, keep the session, and pull structured data out the other side. Python Go Install Python Go Local runs need Chrome installed. Full setup: Quickstart. Why Stagehand Token efficiency Hybrid accessibilit
read the full stagehand overview →
About webclaw
English 简体中文 webclaw Turn websites into clean markdown, JSON, and LLM ready context. CLI, MCP server, REST API, and SDKs for AI agents and RAG pipelines. Most web scraping tools give your agent one of two bad outputs: a blocked page, login wall, or empty app shell raw HTML full of nav, scripts, styling, ads, and duplicated boilerplate webclaw.io is the hosted web extraction API for webclaw. This repo contains the open source CLI, MCP server, extraction engine, and self hostable server. webclaw turns a URL into clean content your tools can actually use. Use it from the terminal, wire it into Claude/Cursor through…
read the full webclaw overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is stagehand or webclaw more popular?
stagehand has 25,934 GitHub stars and webclaw has 2,425. stagehand has the larger community by that measure.
Are stagehand and webclaw free?
Both are open source. stagehand is licensed under MIT and webclaw under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between stagehand and webclaw?
stagehand is written in TypeScript and webclaw 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 webclaw?
Choose stagehand if you want the larger community (25,934 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose webclaw if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.