head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs colly
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars, 9,043 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped yesterday. colly has 25,572 stars, 1,859 forks, 195 open issues and last shipped 18 days ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 239% (86,783 vs 25,572 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; colly is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, colly 7%. Crawl4AI was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (crawler, scraper), 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 | colly | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 87K | ★ 26K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.0K | ⑂ 1.9K |
| 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 colly if
- You want the colly feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and colly 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 colly
Colly Lightning Fast and Elegant Scraping Framework for Gophers Colly provides a clean interface to write any kind of crawler/scraper/spider. With Colly you can easily extract structured data from websites, which can be used for a wide range of applications, like data mining, data processing or archiving. Sponsors NodeMaven: The most efficient proxy provider for Web Scrapping and Automation with the Highest Quality IP on the market. Why NodeMaven? 99.9% uptime ZIP Targeting IP filtering: all proxies have fraud score 1k request/sec on a single core) Manages request delays and maximum concurrency per domain…
read the full colly overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or colly more popular?
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars and colly has 25,572. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and colly free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and colly under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and colly?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and colly 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 colly?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (86,783 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose colly if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.