head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs rod
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars, 9,043 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped yesterday. rod has 7,143 stars, 489 forks, 212 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 1,115% (86,783 vs 7,143 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; rod is written in Go under MIT. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, rod 7%. 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 | rod | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 87K | ★ 7.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-08-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.0K | ⑂ 489 |
| 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 rod if
- You want the rod feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and rod 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 rod
Overview [ ][discord room] Documentation API reference FAQ Rod is a high level driver directly based on DevTools Protocol. It's designed for web automation and scraping for both high level and low level use, senior developers can use the low level packages and functions to easily customize or build up their own version of Rod, the high level functions are just examples to build a default version of Rod. 中文 API 文档 Features Chained context design, intuitive to timeout or cancel the long running task Auto wait elements to be ready Debugging friendly, auto input tracing, remote monitoring headless browser Thread…
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Frequently asked questions
Is Crawl4AI or rod more popular?
Crawl4AI has 86,783 GitHub stars and rod has 7,143. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and rod free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and rod under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and rod?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and rod 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 rod?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (86,783 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose rod if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.