head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs DotnetSpider
Crawl4AI has 83,747 GitHub stars, 8,660 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. DotnetSpider has 4,139 stars, 1,052 forks, 6 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 1,923% (83,747 vs 4,139 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.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Crawl4AI | DotnetSpider | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 84K | ★ 4.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | C# |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-04-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.7K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| 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 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 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 DotnetSpider
DotnetSpider is an MIT licensed .NET Standard web crawling and scraping framework written in C , aimed at .NET developers who need to build high level crawlers that run either on a single machine or across a distributed cluster.
read the full DotnetSpider overview →
More in Data & Analytics
Related comparisons
More Data Extraction & Web Scraping projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Data Extraction & Web Scraping field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or DotnetSpider more popular?
Crawl4AI has 83,747 GitHub stars and DotnetSpider has 4,139. 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 (83,747 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose DotnetSpider if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.