head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs deepcrawl
Crawl4AI has 83,782 GitHub stars, 8,664 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. deepcrawl has 673 stars, 79 forks, 2 open issues and last shipped 26 days ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 12,349% (83,782 vs 673 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; deepcrawl is written in TypeScript under MIT. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, deepcrawl 12%. 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 | deepcrawl | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 84K | ★ 673 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-08-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.7K | ⑂ 79 |
| 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 deepcrawl if
- You want the deepcrawl feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and deepcrawl 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 deepcrawl
Deepcrawl is a free, MIT licensed, agent oriented website data extraction platform that turns public pages into cleaned Markdown, a hierarchical links tree and LLM ready metadata, built for developers running AI agents who want to self host the whole stack on Cloudflare or Vercel rather than pay for Firecrawl.
read the full deepcrawl overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or deepcrawl more popular?
Crawl4AI has 83,782 GitHub stars and deepcrawl has 673. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and deepcrawl free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and deepcrawl under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and deepcrawl?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and deepcrawl 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 deepcrawl?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (83,782 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose deepcrawl if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.