head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs katana
Crawl4AI has 83,747 GitHub stars, 8,660 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. katana has 17,518 stars, 1,183 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 378% (83,747 vs 17,518 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; katana is written in Go under MIT. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, katana 7%. 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 | katana | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 84K | ★ 18K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.7K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| 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 katana if
- You want the katana feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and katana 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 katana
Katana is an open source, MIT licensed crawling and spidering framework written in Go, built for security engineers and automation pipelines that need to map web applications at scale rather than explore them by hand.
read the full katana overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or katana more popular?
Crawl4AI has 83,747 GitHub stars and katana has 17,518. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and katana free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and katana under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and katana?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and katana in Go. 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 katana?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (83,747 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose katana if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.