crawleevskatana

Apache-2.0 175 26 22,720

341.9 thousand (month) Apr 22 2022 3.16.0(2026-04-09 07:36:53 ago)

16,499 6 18 MIT

Nov 07 2022 v1.5.0(2026-03-10 14:52:47 ago)

Crawlee is a modern web scraping and browser automation framework for JavaScript and TypeScript, built by Apify. It is the successor to the Apify SDK and provides a unified interface for building reliable web scrapers and crawlers that can scale from simple scripts to large-scale data extraction projects.

Crawlee supports multiple crawling strategies through different crawler classes:

CheerioCrawler For fast, lightweight HTML scraping using Cheerio (no browser needed). Best for static pages.
PlaywrightCrawler Uses Playwright for full browser automation. Handles JavaScript-rendered pages, SPAs, and complex interactions.
PuppeteerCrawler Similar to PlaywrightCrawler but uses Puppeteer as the browser automation backend.
HttpCrawler Minimal crawler for raw HTTP requests without HTML parsing.

Key features include:

Automatic request queue management with configurable concurrency and rate limiting
Built-in proxy rotation with session management
Persistent request queue and dataset storage (local or cloud via Apify)
Automatic retry and error handling with configurable strategies
TypeScript-first design with full type safety
Middleware-like request/response hooks (preNavigationHooks, postNavigationHooks)
Output pipelines for storing extracted data
Easy deployment to Apify cloud platform

Crawlee is considered the most feature-complete web scraping framework in the JavaScript/TypeScript ecosystem, comparable to Python's Scrapy but with native browser automation support.

Katana is a next-generation web crawling and spidering framework written in Go by ProjectDiscovery. It is designed for fast, comprehensive endpoint and asset discovery and is widely used in the security research and bug bounty communities.

Katana offers multiple crawling modes:

Standard mode Fast HTTP-based crawling without a browser. Parses HTML, JavaScript files, and other resources to discover endpoints and links.
Headless mode Uses a headless Chrome browser for crawling JavaScript-rendered pages and single-page applications (SPAs).
Passive mode Discovers URLs from external sources (Wayback Machine, CommonCrawl, etc.) without actively visiting the target.

Key features include:

Scope control Configurable crawl scope with regex patterns for including/excluding URLs, domains, and file extensions.
JavaScript parsing Extracts endpoints from JavaScript files, inline scripts, and AJAX requests even in standard (non-headless) mode.
Customizable output Filter and format output with field selection, JSON output, and custom templates.
Rate limiting Built-in rate limiting and concurrency control to avoid overwhelming targets.
Proxy support HTTP and SOCKS5 proxy support with rotation.
Form filling Can detect and auto-fill forms to discover endpoints behind form submissions.

While Katana was designed for security research and reconnaissance, its fast crawling capabilities and JavaScript parsing make it equally useful for web scraping discovery and sitemap generation.

Highlights

populartypescriptextendiblemiddlewaresoutput-pipelineslarge-scaleproxy

fastpopularlarge-scale

Example Use

```javascript import { PlaywrightCrawler, Dataset } from 'crawlee'; // Create a crawler with Playwright for JS rendering const crawler = new PlaywrightCrawler({ // Limit concurrency to avoid overwhelming the target maxConcurrency: 5, // This function is called for each URL async requestHandler({ request, page, enqueueLinks }) { const title = await page.title(); // Extract data from the page const products = await page.$$eval('.product', (els) => els.map((el) => ({ name: el.querySelector('.name')?.textContent, price: el.querySelector('.price')?.textContent, })) ); // Store extracted data await Dataset.pushData({ url: request.url, title, products, }); // Follow links to crawl more pages await enqueueLinks({ globs: ['https://example.com/products/**'], }); }, }); // Start crawling await crawler.run(['https://example.com/products']); ```

```go package main import ( "context" "math" "github.com/projectdiscovery/katana/pkg/engine/standard" "github.com/projectdiscovery/katana/pkg/output" "github.com/projectdiscovery/katana/pkg/types" ) func main() { // Configure crawl options options := &types.Options{ MaxDepth: 3, FieldScope: "rdn", // restrict to root domain BodyReadSize: math.MaxInt, Timeout: 10, Concurrency: 10, Parallelism: 10, Delay: 0, RateLimit: 150, Strategy: "depth-first", OnResult: func(result output.Result) { // Process each discovered URL println(result.Request.URL) }, } // Create and run the crawler crawlerOptions, _ := types.NewCrawlerOptions(options) defer crawlerOptions.Close() crawler, _ := standard.New(crawlerOptions) defer crawler.Close() // Start crawling _ = crawler.Crawl("https://example.com") } ```

Alternatives / Similar

colly

25,231 compare

katana new

16,499 compare

pholcus

7,594 compare

geziyor

2,772 compare

dataflowkit

711 compare

scrapy

61,276 compare

crawl4ai new

63,373 compare

rvest

1,517 compare

scrapling new

36,206 compare

mechanize new

4,440 compare

scrapegraphai new

23,278 compare

ferret

5,964 compare

gocrawl

2,053 compare

scrapyd

3,087 compare

botasaurus new

4,321 compare

node-crawler

6,790 compare

panther

3,062 compare

goutte new

9,215 compare

gracy

248 compare

spidr

835 compare

kimurai new

1,098 compare

scrapydweb

3,400 compare

photon

12,807 compare

wombat

1,360 compare

autoscraper

7,136 compare

roach

1,454 compare

gerapy

3,495 compare

ruia

1,743 compare

ralger

165 compare

ayakashi

217 compare

phpscraper

583 compare

dude

425 compare

php-spider

1,341 compare

crwlr-crawler

369 compare

firecrawl new

- compare