head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs ArchiveBox
Crawl4AI has 86,914 GitHub stars, 9,051 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. ArchiveBox has 28,958 stars, 1,631 forks, 159 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 200% (86,914 vs 28,958 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; ArchiveBox is written in Python under MIT. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, ArchiveBox 6%. Crawl4AI was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (python), 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
| Crawl4AI | ArchiveBox | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 87K | ★ 29K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.1K | ⑂ 1.6K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Crawl4AI if
- You weight community size — 87K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick ArchiveBox if
- You want the ArchiveBox feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and ArchiveBox fits your workflow better
About Crawl4AI
🚀🤖 Crawl4AI: Open source LLM Friendly Web Crawler & Scraper. 🚀 Crawl4AI Cloud API — Closed Beta (Launching Soon) Reliable, large scale web extraction, now built to be drastically more cost effective than any of the existing solutions. 👉 Apply here for early access We’ll be onboarding in phases and working closely with early users. Limited slots. Crawl4AI turns the web into clean, LLM ready Markdown for RAG, agents, and data pipelines. Fast, controllable, battle tested by a 50k+ star community. ✨ Check out latest update v0.9.3 ✨ New in v0.9.3 : Security release. Closes five coordinated disclosure advisories…
read the full Crawl4AI overview →
About ArchiveBox
ArchiveBox Open source self hosted web archiving. ▶️ Quickstart Demo GitHub Documentation Info & Motivation Community ArchiveBox is a self hosted app that lets you preserve content from websites in a variety of formats. We aim to make your data immediately useful, and kept in formats that other programs can read directly. As output, we save standard HTML, PNG, PDF, TXT, JSON, WARC, SQLite, all guaranteed to be readable for decades to come. ArchiveBox also has a CLI, REST API, and webhooks so you can set up integrations with other services. Without active preservation effort, everything on the internet eventually…
read the full ArchiveBox overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or ArchiveBox more popular?
Crawl4AI has 86,914 GitHub stars and ArchiveBox has 28,958. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and ArchiveBox free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and ArchiveBox under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and ArchiveBox?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and ArchiveBox in Python. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Crawl4AI or ArchiveBox?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (86,914 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose ArchiveBox if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.