head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs crawlab
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars, 9,043 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped yesterday. crawlab has 12,290 stars, 1,884 forks, 166 open issues and last shipped 9 months ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 606% (86,783 vs 12,290 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; crawlab is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, crawlab 15%. Crawl4AI was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (crawler), 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 | crawlab | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 87K | ★ 12K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-02-10 |
| 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 crawlab if
- You want the crawlab feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and crawlab 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 crawlab
Crawlab 中文 English Installation Run Screenshot Architecture Integration Compare Community & Sponsorship CHANGELOG Disclaimer Golang based distributed web crawler management platform, supporting various languages including Python, NodeJS, Go, Java, PHP and various web crawler frameworks including Scrapy, Puppeteer, Selenium. Demo Documentation Installation You can follow the installation guide. Quick Start Please open the command line prompt and execute the command below. Make sure you have installed docker compose in advance. Next, you can look into the docker compose.yml (with detailed config params) and the…
read the full crawlab overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or crawlab more popular?
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars and crawlab has 12,290. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and crawlab free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and crawlab under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and crawlab?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and crawlab 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 crawlab?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (86,783 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose crawlab if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.