head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs newspaper4k
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars, 9,043 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped yesterday. newspaper4k has 1,169 stars, 118 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 7,324% (86,783 vs 1,169 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; newspaper4k is written in Python under MIT. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, newspaper4k 10%. Crawl4AI was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (crawler, python, scraper), 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 | newspaper4k | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 87K | ★ 1.2K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.0K | ⑂ 118 |
| 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 newspaper4k if
- You want the newspaper4k feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and newspaper4k 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 newspaper4k
Newspaper4k: Article Scraping & Curation, a continuation of the beloved newspaper3k by codelucas Newspaper4k Project grew from a fork of the well known newspaper3k by codelucas which was not updated since September 2020. The initial goal of this fork was to keep the project alive and to add new features and fix bugs. As of version 0.9.3 there are many new features and improvements that make Newspaper4k a great tool for article scraping and curation. To make the migration to Newspaper4k easier, all the classes and methods from the original project were kept and the new features were added on top of them. All API…
read the full newspaper4k overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or newspaper4k more popular?
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars and newspaper4k has 1,169. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and newspaper4k free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and newspaper4k under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and newspaper4k?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and newspaper4k 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 newspaper4k?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (86,783 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose newspaper4k if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.