head to head · open source
Steel vs deepcrawl
Steel has 7,916 GitHub stars, 1,004 forks, 68 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. deepcrawl has 696 stars, 82 forks, 2 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. Steel leads on adoption by 1,037% (7,916 vs 696 stars). Steel is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; deepcrawl is written in TypeScript under MIT. Steel has attracted 13% as many forks as stars, deepcrawl 12%. Steel 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
| Steel | deepcrawl | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 7.9K | ★ 696 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-03 | 2026-08-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.0K | ⑂ 82 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Steel if
- You weight community size — 7.9K 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 deepcrawl if
- You want the deepcrawl feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and deepcrawl fits your workflow better
About Steel
Steel The open source browser API for AI agents & apps. The best way to build live web agents and browser automation tools. Get Started · Documentation · Website · Cookbook ✨ Highlights Steel.dev is an open source browser API that makes it easy to build AI apps and agents that interact with the web. Instead of building automation infrastructure from scratch, you can focus on your AI application while Steel handles the complexity. Under the hood, it manages sessions, pages, and browser processes, allowing you to perform complex browsing tasks programmatically without any of the headaches: Full Browser Control…
read the full Steel overview →
About deepcrawl
Deepcrawl WARNING: DO NOT USE DEEPCRAWL IN PRODUCTION RIGHT NOW AS IT IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE AND STILL UNDER RAPID DEVELOPMENT. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK! 100% free and open source Firecrawl alternative with better performance and flexibility. Ask DeepWiki about this repo NOTE: DeepCrawl doesn’t target anti scraping or anti bot purposes. It’s optimized for high‑frequency agent workloads that scrape public pages to extract cleaned Markdown and a hierarchical links tree. Deepcrawl is an agent oriented website data context extraction platform. It extracts cleaned markdown of page content, agent favoured hierarchical links…
read the full deepcrawl overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Steel or deepcrawl more popular?
Steel has 7,916 GitHub stars and deepcrawl has 696. Steel has the larger community by that measure.
Are Steel and deepcrawl free?
Both are open source. Steel is licensed under Apache-2.0 and deepcrawl under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Steel and deepcrawl?
Steel is written in TypeScript and deepcrawl 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, Steel or deepcrawl?
Choose Steel if you want the larger community (7,916 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose deepcrawl if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.