head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs ketch
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars, 9,043 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped yesterday. ketch has 740 stars, 44 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 11,627% (86,783 vs 740 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; ketch is written in Go under MIT. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, ketch 6%. Crawl4AI was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (ai-agents), 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 | ketch | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 87K | ★ 740 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.0K | ⑂ 44 |
| 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 ketch if
- You want the ketch feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and ketch 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 ketch
ketch A stateless CLI for web search, code search, library docs, and scraping — one binary, no daemon, no API server to run. Why ketch Most research tooling for agents means wiring up several provider SDKs, each with its own auth and response shape. ketch collapses that into one binary with three research surfaces: ketch search — web search, no API key required (Brave, DuckDuckGo, SearXNG, Exa, Firecrawl, Keenable, Tavily, Parallel, SerpBase, Serply, or You.com) ketch code — grep real OSS source across public repos (Grep, Sourcegraph, or GitHub Code Search) ketch docs — curated, version aware library…
read the full ketch overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or ketch more popular?
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars and ketch has 740. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and ketch free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and ketch under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and ketch?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and ketch 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 ketch?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (86,783 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose ketch if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.