head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs deepcrawl
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars, 9,043 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped yesterday. deepcrawl has 696 stars, 82 forks, 2 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 12,369% (86,783 vs 696 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 | ★ 87K | ★ 696 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-08-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.0K | ⑂ 82 |
| 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 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: 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 deepcrawl
Deepcrawl WARNING: DO NOT USE DEEPCRAWL IN PRODUCTION RIGHT NOW AS IT IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE AND STILL UNDER RAPID DEVELOPMENT. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK! 100% free and open source Firecrawl alternative with better performance and flexibility. Ask DeepWiki about this repo NOTE: DeepCrawl doesn’t target anti scraping or anti bot purposes. It’s optimized for high‑frequency agent workloads that scrape public pages to extract cleaned Markdown and a hierarchical links tree. Deepcrawl is an agent oriented website data context extraction platform. It extracts cleaned markdown of page content, agent favoured hierarchical links…
read the full deepcrawl overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or deepcrawl more popular?
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars and deepcrawl has 696. 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 (86,783 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose deepcrawl if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.