head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs playwright-go
Crawl4AI has 87,070 GitHub stars, 9,072 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. playwright-go has 3,539 stars, 250 forks, 4 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 2,360% (87,070 vs 3,539 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; playwright-go is written in Go under MIT. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, playwright-go 7%. playwright-go was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (playwright), 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 | playwright-go | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 87K | ★ 3.5K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-05 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.1K | ⑂ 250 |
| 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 playwright-go if
- You want the playwright-go feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and playwright-go 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 playwright-go
🎭 Playwright for Website API reference Example recipes Playwright is a Go library to automate Chromium, Firefox and WebKit with a single API. Playwright is built to enable cross browser web automation that is ever green , capable , reliable and fast . Headless and headed execution is supported for all the browsers on all platforms. Installation Install the Playwright driver and browsers (add with deps to also install the OS dependencies). Note that you should replace the version number 0.xxxx.x with the version used in your current go.mod . Each minor version upgrade requires a specific Playwright driver…
read the full playwright-go 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 playwright-go more popular?
Crawl4AI has 87,070 GitHub stars and playwright-go has 3,539. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and playwright-go free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and playwright-go under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and playwright-go?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and playwright-go 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 playwright-go?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (87,070 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose playwright-go if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.