head to head · open source
Crawl4AI vs scrapy
Crawl4AI has 83,747 GitHub stars, 8,660 forks, 188 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. scrapy has 64,388 stars, 11,962 forks, 394 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Crawl4AI leads on adoption by 30% (83,747 vs 64,388 stars). Crawl4AI is written in Python under Apache-2.0; scrapy is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause. Crawl4AI has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, scrapy 19%. scrapy 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.
← all 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Crawl4AI | scrapy | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 84K | ★ 64K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.7K | ⑂ 12K |
| 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 scrapy if
- You want the scrapy feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and scrapy 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 scrapy
Scrapy is a web scraping framework written in Python, distributed under the BSD 3 Clause license, and described in its own README as a tool to extract structured data from websites. It is cross platform and requires Python 3.10 or newer. The project is maintained by Zyte, formerly known as Scrapinghub, together with a broader group of contributors, and it lives in the Python ecosystem as an installable library rather than a hosted service. Its repository is roughly seventeen years old, which places it among the longer running projects in the web scraping space.
read the full scrapy 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 scrapy more popular?
Crawl4AI has 83,747 GitHub stars and scrapy has 64,388. Crawl4AI has the larger community by that measure.
Are Crawl4AI and scrapy free?
Both are open source. Crawl4AI is licensed under Apache-2.0 and scrapy under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Crawl4AI and scrapy?
Crawl4AI is written in Python and scrapy 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 scrapy?
Choose Crawl4AI if you want the larger community (83,747 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose scrapy if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.