head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs gain
Crawl4AI has 83,782 GitHub stars, 8,664 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. gain has 2,018 stars, 204 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 4,052% (83,782 vs 2,018 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; gain is written in Python under MIT. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, gain 10%. 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 | gain | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 84K | ★ 2.0K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-08-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.7K | ⑂ 204 |
| 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 gain if
- You want the gain feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and gain 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 gain
gain Async web crawling framework for everyone. Built on asyncio , aiohttp , and lxml / pyquery . Declare items and parsers; gain handles the concurrency, retries, and persistence. Install Linux users can opt into uvloop for an extra speed bump: Requires Python 3.10+. Quickstart Run it: XPath parsers How it works 1. Spider kicks off from start url under a concurrency budget. 2. Parsers either follow (one argument) — discovering more URLs to queue — or extract (two arguments) — instantiating an Item from each matching page. 3. Items use Css / Xpath / Regex selectors to pull fields out of HTML. 4. save() is your as…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or gain more popular?
Crawl4AI has 83,782 GitHub stars and gain has 2,018. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and gain free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and gain under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and gain?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and gain in Python. 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 gain?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (83,782 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose gain if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.