head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs invisible_playwright
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars, 9,043 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped yesterday. invisible_playwright has 2,549 stars, 276 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 3,305% (86,783 vs 2,549 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; invisible_playwright is written in Python under MIT. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, invisible_playwright 11%. Crawl4AI was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (playwright), 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 | invisible_playwright | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 87K | ★ 2.5K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.0K | ⑂ 276 |
| 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 invisible_playwright if
- You want the invisible_playwright feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and invisible_playwright 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 invisible_playwright
Free antidetect browser stealth for Playwright: undetected Firefox fingerprint, headless or headed. Python web scraping and captcha bypass. Open source, and it passes every bot detection test. How it works Anti bots ask two questions, and reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha and Cloudflare Turnstile score the answers. invisible playwright answers yes to both. 1. Is this a real browser? Yes. It is Firefox, patched at the C++ source level. The browser fingerprint is set inside the engine, not injected into the page: navigator, screen, GPU/WebGL, canvas, fonts, audio, WebRTC, timezone, network. Headless or headed, the same values…
read the full invisible_playwright overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or invisible_playwright more popular?
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars and invisible_playwright has 2,549. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and invisible_playwright free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and invisible_playwright under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and invisible_playwright?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and invisible_playwright 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 invisible_playwright?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (86,783 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose invisible_playwright if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.