head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs miasma
Crawl4AI has 85,291 GitHub stars, 8,851 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped yesterday. miasma has 1,198 stars, 40 forks, 12 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 7,019% (85,291 vs 1,198 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; miasma is written in Rust under GPL-3.0. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, miasma 3%. miasma was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (ai), 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Crawl4AI | miasma | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 85K | ★ 1.2K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Python | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-10-11 | 2026-10-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.9K | ⑂ 40 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Crawl4AI if
- You weight community size — 85K 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 miasma if
- You want the miasma feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and miasma 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 miasma
Miasma is a free software anti scraping tool for website operators who want to feed AI crawlers poisoned training data instead of merely blocking them.
read the full miasma overview →
More in Data & Analytics
Related comparisons
More Data Extraction & Web Scraping projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Data Extraction & Web Scraping field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or miasma more popular?
Crawl4AI has 85,291 GitHub stars and miasma has 1,198. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and miasma free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and miasma under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and miasma?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and miasma in Rust. 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 miasma?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (85,291 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose miasma if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.