head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs crawlee-python
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars, 9,043 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped yesterday. crawlee-python has 9,637 stars, 820 forks, 100 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 801% (86,783 vs 9,637 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; crawlee-python is written in Python under Apache-2.0. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, crawlee-python 9%. crawlee-python was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 4 topic tags (crawler, playwright, python, 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-python | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 87K | ★ 9.6K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.0K | ⑂ 820 |
| 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-python if
- You want the crawlee-python feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and crawlee-python 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-python
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 almost 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 persistently store it in machine readable formats, without having to worry about the technical details. And thanks to rich configuration options, you can tweak almost any aspect of Crawlee to suit your project's needs if the default settings don't cut it. 👉 View full…
read the full crawlee-python overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or crawlee-python more popular?
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars and crawlee-python has 9,637. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and crawlee-python free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and crawlee-python under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and crawlee-python?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and crawlee-python in Python. 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-python?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (86,783 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose crawlee-python if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.