head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs lux
Crawl4AI has 83,747 GitHub stars, 8,660 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. lux has 31,686 stars, 3,312 forks, 545 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 164% (83,747 vs 31,686 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; lux is written in Go under MIT. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, lux 10%. 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 | lux | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 84K | ★ 32K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-03-29 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.7K | ⑂ 3.3K |
| 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 lux if
- You want the lux feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and lux 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 lux
Lux is a video download library and command line tool written in Go, released under the MIT license. It ships as a single lux binary that takes one or more URLs and retrieves the underlying media streams, and it also exposes the downloading logic as a Go library that other programs can embed. The project has existed for roughly nine years and lives in the Go ecosystem, distributed through go install alongside the usual operating system package managers.
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or lux more popular?
Crawl4AI has 83,747 GitHub stars and lux has 31,686. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and lux free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and lux under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and lux?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and lux 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 lux?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (83,747 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose lux if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.