head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs crawlee
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars, 9,043 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped yesterday. crawlee has 26,317 stars, 1,740 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 230% (86,783 vs 26,317 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, crawlee 7%. crawlee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (crawler, playwright, 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 | crawlee | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 87K | ★ 26K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.0K | ⑂ 1.7K |
| 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 crawlee if
- You want the crawlee feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and crawlee 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 crawlee
A web scraping and browser automation library Crawlee covers your crawling and scraping end to end and helps you build reliable scrapers. Fast. Your crawlers will appear human like and fly under the radar of modern bot protections even with the default configuration. Crawlee gives you the tools to crawl the web for links, scrape data, and store it to disk or cloud while staying configurable to suit your project's needs. Crawlee is available as the crawlee NPM package. 👉 View full documentation, guides and examples on the Crawlee project website 👈 Do you prefer 🐍 Python instead of JavaScript? 👉 Checkout…
read the full crawlee overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or crawlee more popular?
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars and crawlee has 26,317. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and crawlee free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and crawlee under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and crawlee?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and crawlee 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 crawlee?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (86,783 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose crawlee if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.