replacing Fastcrawl
Scraping and crawling API for AI agents, over REST and MCP — Fastcrawl pricing: Free tier 2,000 credits/month; paid from $5/month. Below: 4 free, self-hostable open source projects that cover the same ground, ranked by real GitHub adoption.
There are 4 open source Fastcrawl alternatives tracked on this registry, against Fastcrawl pricing of Free tier 2,000 credits/month; paid from $5/month. The most-adopted is firecrawl with 183,038 GitHub stars under AGPL-3.0, written in TypeScript. Together the set has 375,816 stars across 2 languages and 3 licences. All 4 are free to self-host with no licence fee, and 4 of 4 received a commit in the last 90 days. 4 head-to-head Fastcrawl comparisons are available.
The open source projects below are free to self-host. If you would rather pay for a managed service, these are the hosted products in the same space — listed with the vendor's own pricing.
Firecrawl is an open-source web context API that enables AI agents to search, scrape, and interact with websites at scale. It lives in the AI and data extraction ecosystem, providing structured, LLM-ready outputs from unstructured web content. Built in TypeScript and licensed under AGPL-3.0, it supports both self-hosting and a hosted service via firecrawl.dev.
AGPL-3.0 · TypeScript · Fastcrawl vs firecrawl →
Crawl4AI is an open-source web crawler and scraper designed to prepare website content for large language model (LLM) workflows. It lives in the Python ecosystem and targets data extraction for RAG, agents, and AI pipelines. Unlike many tools that require API keys or paid subscriptions, Crawl4AI provides direct, self-hosted access to web content with output structured specifically for LLM consumption.
Apache-2.0 · Python · Fastcrawl vs Crawl4AI →
Scrapling is an open-source Python framework for web scraping that spans the whole range from one fetch to a concurrent crawl. Its parser learns from website changes and automatically relocates your elements when pages update, so a selector that worked before a redesign can still find the same data afterward. Its fetchers are built to bypass anti-bot systems such as Cloudflare Turnstile out of the box, and its spider framework scales to concurrent, multi-session crawls with pause and resume, automatic proxy rotation, and a crawl speed that adapts to how fast each website responds and backs off when the site starts blocking.
BSD-3-Clause · Python · Fastcrawl vs Scrapling →
LLM-ready web crawler built for AI data pipelines
🕷️ An adaptive Web Scraping framework that handles everything from a single request to a full-scale crawl! Don't be shy, join here: https://discord.gg/EMgGbDce
Crawlee—A web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js to build reliable crawlers. In JavaScript and TypeScript. Extract data for AI, LLMs, RAG, or G
last updated nightly · ranking method: github stars, live-tracked
firecrawl is the most-starred open source alternative to Fastcrawl in this registry, with 183,038 GitHub stars. 4 alternatives are compared here in total.
Yes. Every project listed on this page is open source and free to self-host — there is no licence fee. Some projects also sell a managed hosted version, but the self-hosted path costs nothing.
Compare licence terms, community size (stars), primary language and release activity. A fast-moving project with a compatible licence and an active maintainer base matters more than raw star count when you are committing to a migration.