head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs article-extractor
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars, 9,043 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped yesterday. article-extractor has 1,913 stars, 157 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 4,436% (86,783 vs 1,913 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; article-extractor is written in TypeScript under MIT. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, article-extractor 8%. Crawl4AI was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (data-extraction), 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 | article-extractor | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 87K | ★ 1.9K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-08-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.0K | ⑂ 157 |
| 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 article-extractor if
- You want the article-extractor feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and article-extractor 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 article-extractor
@extractus/article extractor Extract main article, main image and meta data from URL. Install Deno Node.js / Bun Alternatively, install from npm: Usage APIs extract() extractFromHtml() Transformations Transformation object addTransformations() removeTransformations() Priority order Content sanitization options extract() Load and extract article data from a URL or HTML string. Syntax Example: The result can be null (when no article found) or an ArticleData object: Parameters input required URL string or raw HTML content. parserOptions optional fetcher optional A custom fetch function with the signature (url…
read the full article-extractor overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or article-extractor more popular?
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars and article-extractor has 1,913. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and article-extractor free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and article-extractor under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and article-extractor?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and article-extractor 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, Crawl4AI or article-extractor?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (86,783 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose article-extractor if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.