head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs icrawler
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars, 9,043 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped yesterday. icrawler has 934 stars, 181 forks, 31 open issues and last shipped 11 months ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 9,192% (86,783 vs 934 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; icrawler is written in Python under MIT. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, icrawler 19%. 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 | icrawler | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 87K | ★ 934 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2025-12-10 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.0K | ⑂ 181 |
| 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 icrawler if
- You want the icrawler feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and icrawler 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 icrawler
icrawler ======== .. image:: :target: :alt: PyPI Version .. image:: :target: :alt: Anaconda Version .. image:: :alt: Python Version .. image:: :alt: License Introduction Documentation: Try it with pip install icrawler or conda install c hellock icrawler . This package is a mini framework of web crawlers. With modularization design, it is easy to use and extend. It supports media data like images and videos very well, and can also be applied to texts and other type of files. Scrapy is heavy and powerful, while icrawler is tiny and flexible. With this package, you can write a multiple thread crawler easily by…
read the full icrawler overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or icrawler more popular?
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars and icrawler has 934. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and icrawler free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and icrawler under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and icrawler?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and icrawler 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 icrawler?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (86,783 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose icrawler if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.