head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs gain
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars, 9,043 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped yesterday. gain has 2,017 stars, 203 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 4,203% (86,783 vs 2,017 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. The two share 2 topic tags (crawler, python), 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 | gain | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 87K | ★ 2.0K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-08-09 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.0K | ⑂ 203 |
| 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 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: 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 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…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or gain more popular?
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars and gain has 2,017. 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 (86,783 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose gain if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.