head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs anakin
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars, 9,043 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped yesterday. anakin has 3,881 stars, 164 forks, 82 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 2,136% (86,783 vs 3,881 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; anakin is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, anakin 4%. Crawl4AI was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 5 topic tags (ai, markdown, open-source, playwright), 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 | anakin | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 87K | ★ 3.9K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-08-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.0K | ⑂ 164 |
| 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 anakin if
- You want the anakin feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and anakin 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 anakin
AnakinScraper OSS The open source web scraping API for AI. Turn any website into LLM ready markdown or structured data. Self host with a single command. No cloud dependencies. Powers RAG pipelines, AI agents, and data extraction at scale. Why AnakinScraper? Features Handler chain with fallback — HTTP fetch → anti detect browser → external API. Each handler tries in order; if one fails, the next picks up automatically. Most pages resolve on the free local HTTP handler — paid APIs are only called for the 5% that actually need them. Docs → Custom API handlers — plug in any third party scraping service as a chain…
read the full anakin overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or anakin more popular?
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars and anakin has 3,881. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and anakin free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and anakin under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and anakin?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and anakin in Go. 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 anakin?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (86,783 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose anakin if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.