head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs crawlab
Crawl4AI has 83,747 GitHub stars, 8,660 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. crawlab has 12,273 stars, 1,890 forks, 166 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 582% (83,747 vs 12,273 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.
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 | ★ 84K | ★ 12K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-02-10 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.7K | ⑂ 1.9K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Crawl4AI if
- You weight community size — 84K 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 is an open source web crawler and scraper designed to prepare website content for large language model (LLM) workflows. It lives in the Python ecosystem and targets data extraction for RAG, agents, and AI pipelines. Unlike many tools that require API keys or paid subscriptions, Crawl4AI provides direct, self hosted access to web content with output structured specifically for LLM consumption.
read the full Crawl4AI overview →
About crawlab
Crawlab is a BSD 3 Clause licensed, Go based distributed web crawler admin platform that manages spiders regardless of the language or framework they are written in, built for teams that run many crawlers and need one place to schedule, monitor, and inspect them.
read the full crawlab overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or crawlab more popular?
Crawl4AI has 83,747 GitHub stars and crawlab has 12,273. 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 (83,747 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.