head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs faster-than-requests
Crawl4AI has 83,782 GitHub stars, 8,664 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. faster-than-requests has 1,128 stars, 89 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped 12 days ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 7,327% (83,782 vs 1,128 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; faster-than-requests is written in Nim under MIT. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, faster-than-requests 8%. 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 | faster-than-requests | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 84K | ★ 1.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Nim |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-07 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.7K | ⑂ 89 |
| 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 faster-than-requests if
- You want the faster-than-requests feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Nim
- You evaluated both and faster-than-requests 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 faster-than-requests
faster than requests is an MIT licensed Python 3 HTTP client written in Nim that keeps a requests style call surface while adding a built in multi threaded web scraper, shipping as a single file with no direct dependencies, and it is aimed at developers doing high volume scraping or downloads who find python requests, urllib3, or PyCURL too slow.
read the full faster-than-requests overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or faster-than-requests more popular?
Crawl4AI has 83,782 GitHub stars and faster-than-requests has 1,128. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and faster-than-requests free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and faster-than-requests under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and faster-than-requests?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and faster-than-requests in Nim. 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 faster-than-requests?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (83,782 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose faster-than-requests if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.