head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs DotnetSpider
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars, 9,043 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped yesterday. DotnetSpider has 4,142 stars, 1,047 forks, 6 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 1,995% (86,783 vs 4,142 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; DotnetSpider is written in C# under MIT. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, DotnetSpider 25%. Crawl4AI was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (crawler), 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 | DotnetSpider | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 87K | ★ 4.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | C# |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-04-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.0K | ⑂ 1.0K |
| 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 DotnetSpider if
- You want the DotnetSpider feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches C#
- You evaluated both and DotnetSpider 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 DotnetSpider
DotnetSpider 免责申明：本框架是为了帮助开发人员简化开发流程、提高开发效率，请勿使用此框架做任何违法国家法律的事情，使用者所做任何事情也与本框架的作者无关。 DotnetSpider, a .NET Standard web crawling library. It is a lightweight, efficient, and fast high level web crawling & scraping framework. If you want to get the latest beta packages, you should add the myget feed: DESIGN DEVELOP ENVIROMENT 1. Visual Studio 2017 (15.3 or later) or Jetbrains Rider 2. .NET Core 2.2 or later 3. Docker 4. MySql docker run name mysql d p 3306:3306 restart always e MYSQL ROOT PASSWORD=1qazZAQ! mysql:5.7 5. Redis (option) docker run name redis d p 6379:6379 restart always redis 6. SqlServer docker run…
read the full DotnetSpider overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or DotnetSpider more popular?
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars and DotnetSpider has 4,142. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and DotnetSpider free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and DotnetSpider under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and DotnetSpider?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and DotnetSpider in C#. 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 DotnetSpider?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (86,783 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose DotnetSpider if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.